created by tiki[at]magnolia.ch

MEANY ME :

I was born in Cleveland Ohio, and raised in abject but very colorful poverty in West Virginia by politically active hippie-artist parents who sought to escape the ‘rat race’, but unfortunately knew nothing of living on the land or raising kids. They failed to realize that it could be difficult to earn a living selling fine art in a local economy with 75% unemployment, and a population of highly inbred rednecks who thought art was empty bleach jugs painstakingly snipped into the lovely shape of plastic swans and used for covering the Kleenex box in the outhouse or on the toilet tank.

We had a rusted out Chevy pick-up that was held together by coat hangers, and seldom functioned anyway.

When it worked, my father used it to commute to the only town-like settlement in the surrounding 50 miles, where he taught the odd art class to the odd hippy. My mom tried to supplement our income with freelance work, by painting a series of miserably tacky little girls (‘Valerie Bright’, named after the company she freelanced for ‘Bright of America’) in patch-work dresses and huge floppy pioneer-style bonnets dipping their toes into glassy pools or tickling happy puppies, but oddly enough there was seldom work in this specialized branch of commercial art. When she wasn’t enriching the minds of future generations of young girls, she was working in the pottery shop or in the garden. She We lived down 3 1/2 miles of dirt road, and my brother and I had to walk it twice a day to get to and from the nearest school bus stop. We had a well and pump for water, but it always froze in the winter so we would have to cross the river and carry buckets of water from the spring, Kelly’s Run, on the other side. Though we had running water in the summers, we always had an outhouse instead of a flush toilet. Both of my parents were potters, printers, and painters, and their friends often came from Cleveland to drop out and party with them. Some of their friends were the kindest sweetest people I have ever met and I sometimes miss them terribly (so, if Roland and Shirley Ash, Carson Waterman, Brad Degraf, Annie and Tommy Clark, or Ron Kawalic ever cross your path, please send them my way). We inherited many cats (45 of them) from the previous ‘owners’ of the farm we lived on, and we had house broken chickens, wormy ducks, assorted stray dogs, pigs named after gangsters (Bonny and Clyde), cows that my mom treated like pets, and an odd assortment of nags, ponies and plough-horses. Needless to say, it was an absolute paradise for kids, for the most part. I spent a good deal of my time every spring trying to save the fragile lives of all manner of small ill cast-away animal…moles that had gotten bitten by cats, chicks that hatched lame, kittens that may have had rabies for all I knew…I spent summers in the river near the house swimming and fishing with my brother, gathering wormy apples and chestnuts from the ancient trees, picking blackberries and cat tails near the swamps past the pine grove, or wandering around in the woods alone singing to myself or engaging in long philosophical debates with the squirrels. Sometimes in late summer and fall we would curl up on the cool earth up by the old salt kiln on the hill, would watch as my parents fired it up for another sleepy 24 hour stretch, or we would join the people up the road making apple cider. In the winter my brother and I made things out of clay, painted pictures, played with the wooden toys our mother made for us, and contentedly listened to her read out loud from Alice in Wonderland, Watership Down, The Lord of the Rings, Dorothy and the Wizard of OZ and Winnie the Pooh, each for the 20th time over again.

Unfortunately, in the midst of all of this great mystery and beauty, my parents (as most humans seem to do) spent a good deal of their time trying to devise more effective ways of abusing and degrading one another.

Finally when I was 8, my parents mercifully divorced each other and we went to live in ‘civilization’ with my father. Being a little foreign to it, I didn’t fare well in civilization at all. In fact I was totally lost in it…ship-wrecked and stranded in a totally foerigen world surrounded by lots of nasty greedy fast people. It didn’t help much that or father dragged us from school to school, and city and state to city and state, and was perpetually in a rotten mood. Finally he remarried a woman who had a small daughter, and was always in just as bad a mood as he was. Hmmmm…that didn’t work out too well either. By the time I was 13 I thought I was on the road to becoming criminally insane, and decided that I should probably pack up and move on.

For the next seven years I lived a rather bizarre life that I won’t get too in too much detail. It is enough to say that I did manage to live with and leave my mother and step father within a short time-frame, get through most, but not all of art school, experiment with every drug known to man, become vegetarian, learn to tattoo, live with some great people in a few of the best squats on the planet, and to decide more or less concretely that if I didn’t get out of North Amerikkka I would probably go and…never mind. My mother died unexpectedly in 1989. Near the same time the gulf war slithered like yet another dirty shameful shadow over the land…and that did it for me. I couldn’t stand living up to my knees in blood anymore. I sold all of my paintings for anywhere between $5 and $40, bought a cheap plane ticket, and moved to Europe with a reserve of about $95 in my pocket. To this day, exactly 14 years and four days after I left, I have never once regretted stepping outside of the great-occupation.

Since then I have lived in Switzerland, and worked in an autonomous political and culture center in the Autonomous Peoples Library (volunteer), a polit-café, a short-lived tattoo shop, and worked as a veggie cook in the restaurant there, too. Now I live in a tiny freak village, and have a very small tattoo shop in a wagon here, and spend the rest of my time making political posters, banners, or illustrations and masks, reading, chopping fire wood, screwing around on my lap top, and jumping around at concerts or stumbling along aimlessly through the woods.

Things I Love & Things I Hate

Things I love

the tiny freak- village called ‘zaffaraya!’ where I live,

Female pirates and carpenters,

Michelangelo’s’ weird self portrait in the Sistine Chapel,

My small grey striped 4-legged friend and ex-housemate, Groot, who got squashed by a highway slaughterhouse last spring…(sniff…)

Freda & Diego,

‘Brazil’, ‘Bananas’, ‘Land and Freedom’, ‘Carla’s Song’, ‘Festen’, ‘Madam Butterfly’, ‘Blade Runner’, ‘12 monkeys’, 21 Grams, American Beauty,

Being alone in the woods for extended treks,

Shepard’s and ferry(wo)men,

Emma Goldman, Ulrika Meinhof, Alex Berkman, Malatesta, Naom Chomsky, Ché, Zapata & Co

The lyrics to ‘dust in the wind’ (I know, this is quite tacky),

Eyes that register laughter, anger, etc.,

Forest, desert, hills, Alps, rivers, springs,

All beasts of the wild (happily including snakes, rats, bugs, and spiders), (but not flies),

My beautiful tent and pack, my hiking boots,

Gold teeth, Crows feet, Calloused hands (on men and women),

Skinny-dipping,

Waterfalls, giant oaks, mossy rocks,

Rhododendron along secluded springs (Kelly’s Run)(!),

The smell of the earth in spring and fall, the smell of healthy sweat, the smell of grass, sassafras, leaves, leather, moos, apples, streams, freshly printed paper, cinnamon, cilantro, vanilla, gas stations (odd…), oil paint, turpentine, and brewing coffee,

And rain, the way the air feels right before a storm, thunder and lightening, fire,

Marge Piercy, Huxley, T.C. Boyle, Margaret Atwood, Carson McCullers, Norman Mailer, Kafka, Brian Greene, Tom Wolfe, Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Hiassen, Hemingway, John Irving, John Steinbeck, John D. Barrow, and too many more to mention,

Painting, drawing, sculpting, writing, tattooing, doodling, reading, Making love, Dancing, Building things,

Riding my bike, squatting, being at an awesome concert with great people, working outside in the summer with people (like building our new bath-house, digging a new out-house),

International demonstrations where you meet up with people you have missed for years,

Any demos or actions that remind me for a moment that the future is still unwritten,

All Fruits & Veggies, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, lintel sprouts, avocadoes, persimmons (!), fresh tomatoes from the vine in the height of summer…eaten like apples with a pinch of salt(!), ripe paw-paws! (no one knows what paw-paws are, I know…take my word for it though, if I was offered the choice between a pound of ripe paw-paws or a pound of gold, I wouldn’t hesitate to take the paw-paws. I mean it)

Woody Guthrie (!), The Ramones, Utah Phillips, Ani DiFranco, Crass, Mercedes Sosa, Gillian Welch, The Clash, John Prine, Steve Earle, Muddy Waters, Phil Ochs (!), Leadbelly, Blackfire, Joy Division, Vivaldi, Mozart, D.O.A, Joe Hill, Tone Stein Scherben (!), Die Ärtzte, UK Subs, Nina Simone, Donovan, The Yardbirds, Primus, X-Ray Specs, Lightening Hopkins, Bessie Smith, Iggy Pop, Talking Heads, Operration Ivy, John Lee Hooker, John Hurt, Henry Thomas, Ben Harper, Dead Kennedy’s, Willy Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Carlos Montoya, Bela Fleck, Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat, Alice in Chains, Gil Scott-Heron, Green Day, Credence Clearwater Revival, (old) Dylan, Jimmy Cliff, Patty Smith, Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, the Stranglers, Specials, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Marianne Faithful, Black Sabbath, …etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc…(56)

Mandolin, fiddle, banjo, guitar, harmonica, bass, drum, flute…oh, geez…

Things that go ‘flapflap’ in the wind and’ bump’ in the night,

hanging around my wagon alone at night reading, day dreaming, doing whatever,

Something else I really love

When the world around you/me is so rich with input that its individual elements, smells, sounds, heat or cold, colors… separate into great sliding sheets of its individual components and recombines like some universally huge complete puzzle. To explain this in a way that should reassure you that I am not under the influence of LSD, I have to use an example from my childhood. During the highest heat of summer out in the fields where I was raised, when the crickets sang in the rustling blades of papery dry grass, and the low running river made a barely audible ‘hussssh, shhh’ in the distance, I would sit or lay down in the field and be flooded, totally overwhelmed by the smell of dry earth, wild strawberries, grass, by the emmense expanse of the blue, blue nearly cloudless sky above me, big enough to swallow up the whole world, the deep cool black-green ring of the woods, oaks poplar, birch, plum and dogwood, surrounding the field, the dusty ocher of the dry earth, blue-black of the beetles skittering around the grass roots, the individual sounds around me, the distant clank of a handle against its bucket, the hum of bees weaving in and out of the steady song of crickets, the ‘neigh’ of a horse, the far off ‘sisss, sisss’ of popular leaves trembling against the breeze….and all of this would spin around me until it separated into great liquid sheets of sensation, each sound, each color, each smell…so that I could pick any one out and fall into it completely, and it became impossible to tell the difference between sound and color and smell…then they would all spin and weave themselves together like a great puzzle solving its self, and create the world around me new again…Just thinking about now it gives me such an aching. I still get this feeling back, but only after I have been hiking alone in the woods for longer than two or three weeks at a time, and never quite like I used to.

Something else I love very much

Once, after a terrible fight with my drunken step father I ran out into a tilled field behind a neighbors property, and threw myself down on my back, and lay there for a long time just looking up at the sharp clear night sky. I don’t know how long I lay there focused beyond the sky, thinking and feeling nothing…but somehow suddenly I was actually seeing what I was looking at. I saw an eternity, trillions of bodies of light and heat spinning forever out and away from each other, an impossibly vast space that no words or human concepts could ever possibly venerate…and I saw myself, an atom, a speck of dust on a speck of dust, and I saw humanity…and all of us together, we weren’t even a millisecond, or an idea or a single blinking of an eye in the universe, we were completely swallowed up in it and became nothing but an infinitesimally miniscule ingredient in its steady magically mindless eternal expansion and contraction. And all of this just flooded over me in a wordless feeling of awe, and a feeling of free falling through an endless void with no earth beneath me at all.

Fragments of that feeling have come back to me since, but never as complete as that night…partly, I guess, because I’m too conscious of my desire to experience the same thing over again and I can’t completely let go. Still, any time the sky is crisp and clear I will throw myself down of whatever is handy, the hood of a car, a park bench, the ground, and gaze up at the sky until the void inside of me is filled with awe again.

It’s amazing that humans find themselves and their concerns so fucking important, their wars and oil pipelines, their hiroshimas and nagisakis, and invasions, occupations, spring scented shower gel, fast planes, flavor enhansers, plastic wrap, prime-time television, rippled BB-Q chips, trendy shoes, self image, sex enhancement pills, sportt cars, DVD burners…and here we are…atomic dust dancing to the tune of one of the great mysteries…and we think that we are so screwing important, so central to the goings on of the universe. Pah!

Things I hate

Cops, prisons, red necks, racist sexist and homophobic wankers, neo Nazis,

Zoos, Animal parks, aquariums and terrariums (sorry Benny, your aquarium is really impressive…and you’ve given your captives lots of space to swim around in),

Bush, his cabinet, his supporters,

The us government and everything it has ever done (!),

His-story,

War, poverty, torture, misery, exploitation,

People who keep their homes uncomfortably clean,

Property ownership, private property,

men who exaggerate their heroic exploits in order to impress women, men (and women) who talk incessantly about themselves (ha! I’m not TALKING, I’m writing), people who interrupt others while they are speaking,

Fast food/McDeath, TV and almost everything on it (I do like those nature programs, and documentary films too), commercial ‘music’, the rip-off music industry, video games,

People who litter (!), shout in the woods, hike with their dogs, don’t watch where they are stepping, waste food, and over heat their homes, sculpt half the bulk of their dialogue with critics of everyone but themselves,

Operation Rescue, Pat Robinson, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell,

Government and politicians,

Land theft, occupation, settlement politics,

Money, wealth, and greed,

Nuclear anything/everything,

Hydroponics, factory farming, slaughterhouses,

Genetic engineering, the pharmaceutical industry, industrial aquaculture,

The criminalization of free thought and speech, the total destruction of what ever few feeble civil liberties were still in place before 9-11,

Phrases like ’collateral damage’ and ‘human resources’,

Frustrated and dangerous peace-police whose only goal seems to be getting you shot in the face with rubber bullets at demos,

The institutionalized beauty ideal,

Cosmetic surgery, beauty diets,

High heels and other very gender specific clothing,

Extreme gender roles,

Folks who baby talk to their kids(!),

People who put clothes on their dogs or give them funny haircuts, and people who hit or in anyway abuse their dogs, lovers, or children,

The advertising industry, mass media,

Un-self-critical indulgence in stupid privileges,

Organized religion, Christianity,

People who think poverty is a choice, people who show contempt the homeless, beggars, junkies and other dispossessed folks,

People who think that it is their god given right to rip mother-earth to shreds,

Coal, ore, uranium and diamond mining, earth moving, strip mining, drilling and pipe lines, clear-cutting, the lumber industry,

Polluters and pollutants, the National Forest Service (fuck you scumbags!), people who get huge packs of those tiny little plastic bottles of soda just so they have more trash to pitch out the windows of their speeding stinking gas guzzling (kitten squashing) cars,

Holliday tourism, travel packages, guided tours, cruise ships, speed boats, water jets, snow-mobile tourists, ski resorts, wellness farms,

Mountain sport (with the exception of respectful hiking and bouldering), off-road sport, humvees,

The lottery, Cars, super-highways,

The IMF, World Bank, WTO, WEF, AFTA, NAFTA, NATO, OPEC, G8, the Vatican, FBI, CIA, GOD, and the whole fucking McManifest-Destiny of the U.S. military industrial complex,

Gee, I could go on and on forever, I really could, but I think I would feel better if I concentrated on the things I love a little more…

Most beautiful experience ever

Having a doe walk right up to me in the rainy winter woods where I was hiding the night I ran away from home 21 years ago. Before she appeared I was sure that the sound of cracking twigs was the sound of my worst nightmares sneaking up on me, and that they were right there behind me about to end my short life in some unspeakably horrible manner. But it was only a beautiful doe, and she stuck her ears out to the side and looked into my eyes for almost a whole minute before turning and strolling away, nibbling at things as she went. I cried.

Most inspiring experience ever

Having the pleasure and honor of developing and painting an 80 square meter mural together with the amazing political artist, Marc Rudin, in 1997. painting such large images required the movement of the entire body, and the painting was more like a dance than a studio assignment. Besides that, Mark Rudin is an amazing political artist whom I had admired long before meeting him in person, and working with him was the best. If I could learn that much every time I set out to do something, I would be the richest person alive.

Ugliest experience ever

Smelling the blood and urine and fear in the day-school the day after the Nazi-caribinjari pigs in Genoa raided demonstrators sleeping there. Stepping over pools of blood and urine all over the floors the day after, seeing the bloody handprints on the walls. The bloody wads of paper, bloody clumps of hair, …the terrible smell of fear perfuming the air like rotting maple syrup…The hair is raising on my arms as I write this. It was a lot, lot worse than any other bad thing I have ever experienced, and that is saying a lot.

Weirdest experience ever

Seeing a car crash about 45 seconds before it happened, then about 5 minutes later seeing a huge red ball of fire (by huge, I mean thousands of meters in diameter) roll across the horizon. No one else could see it. I was 11 at the time. No one ever believed me.

Funniest Experience ever

Many, many years ago my best friend in art school and I wolfed a five pound bag of those hideously red dyed pistachios right before we made it into a downtown subway station. As soon as we hit a bench, she projectile-puked up 2 1/2 pounds of hot-hot magenta bile and millions of tiny grasshopper-green chunks in a bright fuming spray around our feet…I instantly followed her example, being one of those puke-reflex-pukers. We noticed that the great constant hubbub of the tram station had died away to a startlingly complete silence, and we both looked up to see about 250 people clad in dreary office attire slowly stumbling away form us in a great half circle…looks of abject horror on their faces…we fell into one of those totally hopeless side splitting bouts of hysterical gasping teary laughter (just like the weasels in ‘Rodger Rabbit’), and couldn’t even stand up to run away when the security guys came for us. Aahhh, those were the days…I miss you Cat!