The Aorus X5-CF1 Laptop

Is this a laptop worth maxing out credit cards?   Is this just the thing for the avid computer enthusiast who wants raw power, distinctive looks and high performance?    Even if you are not a gamer, artists, designers and video editors may find this device appealing, but make sure you have some deep pockets.   Tech like this does not come cheap.

Milkweed Arts: A New Arts Educational Center

I am very thrilled about being associated with this new art educational facility in downtown Phoenix.  This is a wonderful space and great location and I am very happy to be a part of this exciting venture.



I feel that I have a space where I can teach the way I want without compromise!

I like the idea of quality and accessibility as well.



I am also offering a critique session that will offer insights, direction with exhibitions and ways to prepare a grants package and other details often over looked in the art making process.



You can visit Milkweed Arts and see the great programs they are offering.



My site is up and I am truly thrilled by this new project.

Joni Mitchell: The Lone Brave Maverick

Or, Joni Mitchell Rebel With A Clue. 

An over view of the release HEJIRA, 

Joni Mitchell, the cool jazz siren circa 1976 source

           

                Sex has always been Joni Mitchell’s favorite subject.  That may not be on first inspection obvious because she always coils it so tightly with romantic love. A bond so tight that they cannot be separated.  Like a true romantic, even a disillusioned one, sex seen in isolation is just too barren a field to explore. There has to be more.

                Of all of the singer songwriters in American music, few have dissected their love life so vigorously as Mitchell.  With the eye of a surgeon and the heart of a poet, she relentlessly examines the wins and losses of love as if to make sense of them as much as she expresses them.

 Hers is an art form that is ultimately about expression and communication with as few concessions to anyone’s expectations except her own.   It was clear early in her career that she was at the helm and would tireless work to ensure that her vision was the dominate one.

Even at her most lofty, and Hejira is one of those moments, there is always the faint  feeling that she is trying to learn something from her own past, even if only how to record it.  There is the sense that she is trying to figure out what she is doing and why so as not to repeat the same mistake twice.

The only woman to play at the Band's Last Waltz.  Then again, she was always one of the boys.

                Court and Spark witnessed her at her most romantic and high spirited. She was creating songs that were about anxiety while expressing it all with music that was anything but uncertain. It was a sure footed meeting of jazz, rock and roll and the standard pop song that she reworked in a way that was a hybrid of all forms but losing none of the flavor of any of them.   Even in this release, she was still a romantic even at her most apprehensive about the outcome of love.

It is just that type of merger of the romantic with the sexual explorer that makes Hejira one of her masterpieces, albeit a very dark one.   After the musical explorations and experiments of the Hissing of Summer Lawns, Mitchell scaled back her sound to almost minimalist dimensions so as to turn inward.

Hejira is not a return to her folk past, but it certainly recalls it.  It also shares with Bob Dylan the idea of a song extending far  beyond three minutes with lyrics that are far denser than what most popular songs dare to do.  Even today, few songs attempt the sprawling lyric expansiveness of Hejira.

The back story of the album was that Mitchell was making a cross country drive from Maine back to California.  During the journey, her experiences became the material for Hejira.  It is an album about the road, but it is more than just a collection of road songs.  

When taken as a whole, Hejira tackles the subject of love, romance, wanderlust, creative freedom, choice and the drive to make art.  It is ambitious material.   Like the visual artist she has always been, the song are jam packed with symbolism: of the visual kind.  The highway becomes a metaphor for life, birds are symbols of freedom and coyotes represent appealing, but fleeting lovers.

If there is one song that encompasses the theme of the recording, Amelia is it.   Likening herself to another woman who dared to explore in a world dominated by men,  Mitchell compares her journey to that of the lost aviatrix Amelia Earhart.  She also brings in Ikarus, the Greek who sailed too close to the sun and fell to earth used here as a symbol of love so ambitious and over reaching that it falters under its own mammoth ambitions. 

At one time a model in her native Canada, she still fascinates in her 70's 

.

The inference is that if you chose a life of adventure and embrace brave new creative terrain openly, the risk can be your own destruction.  Superficially, the song is about love lost.  On a much deeper plain it is so grand and so profoundly sorrowful that she makes  a compelling case that romantic failures are worth the pain if for nothing else the inspiration they provide.  

Mitchell has frequently painted love, even marriage, as things to be desired, but always leery.  Love, even for one’s craft, is a double edged sword that cuts harshly both ways.   For her, a woman who selects marriage and domesticity risks the loss of her muse, new love, adventure and the draw of the road.  

To be connected to a soul mate means the abandonment of the mournful siren who suffers for her craft.  Whatever path chosen, the romantic power of dangerous liaisons with dashing men is just too strong for an artist dependent on them for inspiration to reject.  Even in this portrait of love, sex is the magic fuel that ignites passions and romantic longings.

Mitchell may question her decisions, but she never goes so far as to regret them. When love ends, it ends. 

Detroit's hot folk couple.  In the end, Joni would take her husband's name and build her own career.

Ultimately, she selects the promise of the road.  There is never any question about the path she has chosen.   When she sang, “Its always come for me,” she knew damn well that she was destined to be the singer songwriter that was going to emotionally suffer for the sake of art.  Even if the rewards are great, happiness may very well be the cost.

If many of her follower’s mimic the intimate nature of her music, few manage to make the jump to self-revelation that becomes artistic expression.   Mitchell never simply recounts an experience, she lends them a majesty that make the smallest human moment an epic theatrical event.  It is not an easy task to accomplish without looking foolish.   

For an artist who never seemed particularly worried about what anyone thought, she created her music her own way and managed to surround herself with talented players who “got” what she was saying.  If the session players of L.A. considered her chords, odd hybrids, she found sanctuary with jazz musicians.

The late Jaco Pasotrious brings his fretless bass to the front of the line here and is a strong presence even where he is absent.  It is almost as if Pastorious and Mitchell were a duet on Hejira with both parts intertwined. The interplay between the two create a sound that is unique and sensual.  While  Hejira doesn’t sound like a pure jazz album, it certainly takes a great deal of inspiration from the idiom.  

Hejira could be conceived as an extended poetry reading.  The singing fits the mood of the compositions, and in many ways carry much of the melody.  Sounding partly sung and partly spoken, there is a remote quality here that actually is put to great effect.  There is even a sense of humor found between the lines.

One of the post poignant and simultaneously cynical is the character study that makes up “Furry Sings The Blues.”   Her visit to the aging musician Furry Lewis is granted because of the gifts she brings, cigarettes and liquor.  He is fully aware he is only being sought for what he represents and Mitchell is fully aware of the contrast between a successful musician and one facing obscurity in reduced circumstances.   

A visual artist derailed by circumstance, she managed to bring the lofty world of fine art to music

In a much earlier song, “For Free,” Mitchell explored the contrasts between herself and a street musician.  This time around, she has brought details, a character portrait.  She paints the scene of a once thriving Black community reduced to rumble and commercialization. She also makes a connection between the ill Lewis and the community around him both facing bleak times.   

The song also operates as a not too veiled premonition that Mitchell herself could end up alone with smoke and drink facing the inevitable conclusion of a life of wanderlust.  Mitchell certainly sees aspects of herself in the aging musician with the implicit understanding that they may share a similar fate: aging.

Hejira quietly puts forth the dilemma of women in music.  When success and fame hit, they bring comprise, fears and the potential for self-destruction.   For a woman, the price may be any kind of family life.  While Mitchell is hailed as the great chronicler of female experience, she is not alone.

Aretha Franklin, the titanic talent that can confidently handle nearly anything thrown at her, is often under rated as an articulate sage.   Jazz, blues, soul, gospel, rock and roll even opera, she is the force of musical power that confidently spells out the real trouble women have.   If Mitchell is the cool lady of sorrows, Franklin is the vocal power of emancipation, fear, need and expression.  Both are doing similar things, but in wildly different ways.

She may have been the quintessential California Blonde, but she felt a kinship with Black men.

If Franklin states her case directly, Mitchell is the very restrained English woman who depends on veiled language to get the point across.  While she is not armed with a voice that can shake the rafters or the anguish of a Roy Orbison, Mitchell uses her cool voice, well-chosen words and idiosyncratic musical approach to become effective and powerful. Hejira will never be a party album, but it packs a powerful punch when heard.

The big contrast with Mitchell is that she is feminine externally but in attitude very much like  a strong willed man marking his path and taking lovers as the situations dictate.  In a song like Coyote, she is not the wounded woman but the sexual conqueror who reflects with no regrets.  She is only pissed off when her current man has a wondering eye in her presence.  

 Mitchell knows the ways of men and eventually laughs it all off as just part of the party.   She maybe stung by lost love, but never so wounded that she can’t keep going.  She is much stronger than she looks and very much an artist who overrides gender entirely.  In no way has she ever been a traditional woman in song.

Far too important and relevant to ever become an oldies act. A fate that many would find.

Hejira unlike the wordiness of some rockers, is the achievement of an artist at a high point.  Mitchell’s ultimate achievement maybe her ability to build music every bit as quirky as her poetic sensibility that come together in a fascinating way.   No matter how you size it up, the genre she has more or less created puts her in a class all her own.  Many have taken from her, but few can match what she does the way she does it.  As tightly woven as she has been in the music world, she has followed her own sound independent of trends or fashion.  

When I hear music from different places in time, Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter sound as if taken from another time. They have aged well which is a testament to how well they were crafted. 

Hejira is a unique recording, and it fits in with the developments that drew her to creating her first all out jazz recoding, Mingus, a collaboration with the last bassist Charles Minugs.

The 70’s were a creative time for Mitchell.  Even in later years, she has managed to keep the spirit going for so much longer than her many peers.  Rather than fall into repeating herself or becoming an artist content with her past achievements, she has been able to expand and continue for a long time in a music industry not given to providing platforms for creative mavericks.  

 Her legacy may very well rest on her status as a loner.  It is the ultimate  “cool” and the only path to authenticity.

By Kurt von Behrmann

Mr. von Behrmann is an artist who writes.  Currently living and working in Phoenix, Arizona, he is working an new pieces for an art exhibition about bipolar disorder.  

To learn more, and continue support for projects like this, visit this Link.

Thank you.

Cutter: A painting about self injury

By:  Kurt von Behrmann

Video 

Cutter, an acrylic on canvas painting, 2015

Cutting never seemed like something I had ever done in the past.  When I started cutting my wrists recently, I realized that I had done it before, but not the severity that was coming now.  My mind tends to forget memories that are not pleasant. This amnesia works until something wakes me.

Cutters may self-harm for a variety of reasons. Mine started from a real attempt at suicide. The pain of being immobile and mental agony was so strong I could feel it as if it were one large physical wound. I could never point to where the pain was emanating. I did not have headaches, or throbbing pain. What I had was an overwhelming weariness of going around and around bipolar poles of up and then down.

If life was going to be a perpetual shift of constant moods from suicidal depression to over the top optimism, there was no value in continuing when you are unable to do anything but go up and down and up and down. I was worn out, and it was not from age. I know what growing older feels like. This was something very different.

They say you don’t recall pain. You may not be able to recall it like some memories, but intellectually I had a very solid picture in my mind of what I felt. I knew where my mind was. I was slipping into a reality of my own invention.

This was something like a semi delusional break from reality. It was a break where I was going to a place that is incorporeal. This was the place where beautiful things are made, then damaged. This is not the lofty heights of mania that conjure magnificent dreams. This place is located in the hostile interior of the mind and it is dark, theatrical, intense, poetic, but far too dangerous a place to stay. When I was thrown into that world, cutting was a way out of the tentacles of sorrows.

The first cut hurts. They all do, but I continued because I was expressing myself. I was unleashing the pressure that was holding such a vice like grip on everything I was doing. All I was capable of doing was feeling pain. The respite provided by mania was absent. Cutting jolted me back to the real world. I felt things again. The mental pain was replaced by a desire to keep cutting. I felt alive.

I tried to stop cutting, but I couldn't. I wanted to see if I could endure the pain. I wanted to draw blood. I knew this was madness, but I could not stop. I was a junky promising to go to rehab knowing full well that the monkey on my back is always in need of a meal that I would always provide. I felt like I was hooked on my own cutting.

I felt pain, but I just closed my eyes. When I opened them my marks were like battle scars. They were linear pieces of art dug into my skin. They were my own personal statement. In a crude way they looked beautiful. That was what I was thinking of at the time. A row of horizontal lines running from my wrists up my arm. Each one was deeper. Each mark let just a little more air out of the pressure cooker that was my mind.  As I progressed I do so eyes open. 

My mind was two edged sword. I had a sense that this was crazy. I had another sense that told me this was what I needed to do. It felt good and bad. I was sliding down, but I thought this was not so bad. People do more damage than this. I felt proud. I had created my own performance piece of art for myself.

When I stopped, I felt better. I felt that I was really painting in my own blood.

“Cutter” was my expression of the cutting experience. It was not long after I had my first cutting episode that I thought this experience would make a compelling painting.

Faster than any work I have ever created before, Cutter arrived like Athena out of Zeus’ head. The details needed defining, but I had a total mental picture in my mind of what I wanted to say about cutting. There were no long studies. There were no confused areas. Cutting emerged in my mind complete. The only way that image was ever going to leave me is if I painted it.

There was an almost religious ritual like quality with this painting. I was delving into the very depths of an experience, and it was revealing. Just as I go through the trials and tribulations of creating, I do not remember the feeling of pain in making this piece.  I know there were rough areas, but I do not remember them. 

I remember what I felt when I cut intellectually, even the relief it provided.  But I do not recall the pain that I know was there when I made this piece.

Like “Horse,” “Cutter” was created entirely while I was on medications. I was also using the same influences as “Horse.” They are closely related. They both use animals to represent the mind. They both are inspired by the same sources.

Central to the work is the expressionistic eagle. It represents a mind in chaos. It also represents a mind that is decisive, sharp and desperately hanging on with talons grasping the essence of sanity itself. There is fear, anxiety, pride and flight. The spread wings are lighter on one side and darker on the other. The wings and background are divided in half.  One side is bright, the up side of bipolar. The other side is dark, the depressed side of bipolar.

The arms on either side of the eagle represent mania and depression. Stylized to a great degree, the lines on the arm on the right show straight horizontal red lines.  Those strokes represent the cuts.

Unintentionally, I had created the colors of the old German flag of red, black and white. It is something subtle, but I noticed it not long after I created it.  My father was an artist and this was an unconscious reference to him and German art.  For years I wanted to create work that specifically addressed my father.  Due to circumstances beyond his control, he could not create art. In the back of my mind I believe part of my drive is to create is to continue what he could not.

According to what was passed down to me, my Great Grandfather had substantial talent. It was told to me that he actually was accepted at an art institute of some sort to become an artist.  He felt there was no use in going, which was tragic. But, he was considered talented enough to create fine art for the church in his community.  That was a fact given to me much later in life. The vast majority of my family were musicians, on both sides.

Intense emotion is, at least for me, a challenge. This time, the eagle became so much darker. The eyes were not the eyes of a bird. They were the eyes of a man.