The Emerald Fish of Toto Jinja

In the middle of Harajuku in the center of Tokyo, there is a public park called Togo Jinja and it is a lovely green in the middle of a consumerist barrage.  Every Sunday afternoon there is a flea market with all manner of paper ephemera and other curiosities.  Naturally, I spent a fortune here, being a paper fetishist.  I was over the moon with envy for all of the amazing and lovely things that were here and bought as much as I could to make my Tokyo pieces.

It is a gorgeous small park with a shrine in the middle of it and all kinds of small koi and goldfish ponds, some only 10 to 15 feet wide with little bridges over them.  It also has a winding path that takes one in and out of the shade.  Watching the bargaining that goes on is all kinds of fun.  I never dicker and the price they ask is the price I give.  The Japanese bargain hard.  I watched some contentious contests of will that I swore would maybe come to blows, only to be concluded with a hearty “hai” and some laughter and then, perhaps, some sharing of tea.

I like to think about that place now that I am sack-deep in a Chicago winter.  These are getting old for me and the 10 degree days of gray skies and almost no sunlight are grim and depressing.  The temperament of the town sometimes doesn’t help.  It is election season in Illinois and every slack-jawed hand-job in the village is running for something.  Of particular interest is the Governor’s race, with a bunch of haircuts promising to clean up politics.  Yeah.  The one decent guy seems to be Quinn, the sitting Governor, who seems like a boy scout and a decent guy, but I fear he has all of the political charisma of a vanilla milkshake.

There is so much to love about Chicago–its diversity and color and boundless energy. . . its proud architecture and grand theatrical and literary history.  It is a great city worth fighting for.  I often watch movies that are shot here, whether they are any good or not, just to look at the city and marvel at its raw physicality; its brick and steel and wires, its boundless grace and tempestuous history.  It is one of the great cities of this world.  But winter?  Fuck me.

It makes me miss all of the warm places I go; Japan in September, New Orleans in winter, New Mexico and Arizona in autumn.  It is 15 degrees as I write this.  You can’t walk five blocks without your crank turning into a popsicle.

I miss TogoJinja and feeding Big Macs to the koi, drinking green tea and walking foreign streets and parks.  It’s the wanderlust . . . it’s got me bad.

The Crow Dog

I kind of used my dog, Chooch, for the head of this piece.  He is a handsome motherfucker and if he wasn’t fixed he’d get more pussy than Sinatra.  Whenever I walk him people “ooh” and “aah” over him.  He is a tough little bastard.  Don’t get between him and his food or he’ll fuck you up.  He is vigilant about keeping squirrels out of my yard and the squirrels give him a wide berth.  There was one who insisted on hanging out on the back porch and taunting Chooch, talking all kinds of rodent-smack.  One day, Chooch caught his ass in the middle of the yard and settled his hash for good.  That day a fuzzy-tailed rat got to meet Jesus.  Since then, word has gotten around the squirrel and rodent community that my yard is off limits.  Fuck around with Chooch and he will stack asses.

Mexican Indians are big believers in the Shapeshifters, as in a big black bird landing on the ground and then turning into a black wolf.  Nature is a trickster capable of adapting and changing shape.  The Mestizo make figures that imply many species of birds and animals cobbled together with interchangeable features suggesting magic and that nature itself is the almighty.  Hopi prophesy also speaks to this.

I’ve always loved mythical creatures like harpies and griffons with their lion bodies and bird wings.  When I was a kid, I had a habit of drawing people with bird heads and birds with dog heads, and I was delighted by making these things.  It used to freak out the nuns and they were forever sending me to the school shrink, who was a dandruff laden dip-shit who spit when he talked.  I thought he was a putz and I would make up shit to make him think I was a head-case.  I remember leaving a bag of dog shit on his desk once with jelly beans in the top half so he would reach in and when he grabbed a handful . . .

I hated when they wouldn’t just leave me the fuck alone in Tony-land, I was happy there.

The Dog of Winter (For Ten Bears)

Driving back from California through the desert, one is always cognizant of the hungry world that surrounds you.  The desert may seem still, but beyond what you can see it is teeming with life . . . coyotes, owls, hawks, vultures and some genuinely scary-ass reptiles, thick western diamondbacks, prairie rattlers, gila monsters and sidewinders.

There are small boars called javelinas; ugly little fuckers who love-you-not.  There are roadrunners who tear along the desert until they find a lizard to peck to death and devour.  They are psycho-looking sons-of-bitches who remind us that for all of the cute photos of baby seals and shit like that, that nature is around-the-clock murder.

There are prairie dogs who all of the predators rely on for food.  They are reliable because they are dumb motherfuckers with a brain the size of a marble and just about as sharp.  They are forever getting picked off by everything that flies, walks or crawls.  They’re like a more stupid version of rabbits, without the dork-ears.

There are packs of dogs everywhere.  Dogs domesticate easier than any other animal; they also go feral faster than any other animal.  Die on “Fido” and see what his ass is eating three days later.

Months ago I made some scarecrows and I’ve missed making them.  In many Native American stories, wolves and coyotes are tricksters invested with a ferocious spiritual presence.  This piece is called, “The Dog of Winter.”

The Horse Star (For Crazy Horse)

All through the Badlands there are reminders of who used to own this land.  There are  hay-colored grasses and scrub trees standing silently like penitent monks or atavistic sentries that bore witness.  Then and now, window rocks from the “Devil’s Tower” where the  Sioux kept watch  for cavalry and road agents and bounty hunters, who collected a tarriff for every Sioux they killed.  The natural history and landscape of the Badlands still bear the impression of the bloody and brutal history  that unfolded there.

We sometimes think of the Badlands as only Montana and the Dakotas.  It actually spanned many states and the Great Plains almost as a whole.  Horses were not introduced to the Americas until the Spanish brought them in 1640 or so and the Sioux were among the first tribes to become expert horsemen.  Horses were of more value than land in many Native American cultures.

Crazy Horse was a superior rider who could do many other things while riding a horse.  He was as expert at breaking and training horses as well as capturing wild horses.  As a young man, Crazy Horse stole another brave’s wife, Black Buffalo Woman, who it is said he was in love with ’til the day he died.  Upon being confronted and captured by tribal elders, he was forced to return her as well as two horses to the aggrieved brave.  This was considered an extremely harsh penalty.  All Black Buffalo Woman would have had to do in order to divorce the brave was to move his stuff  out in front of their tent and this would have been the only statement necessary regarding the finality of their marriage.  Crazy Horse was heartbroken by this and became even more reckless in leading war parties and raids.  His first wife, Yellow Dress, grieved endlessly over his taking up with another woman and died at a young age.

At a relatively young, age Crazy Horse lost the woman he loved, a brother and his father, and it probably affected the view he had of the world.  That life was perilous, short, bitter, and fragile. . .this piece is called, “The Horse Star.”

Winter Monument (For Crazy Horse)

When one drives through the Badlands or the Gila wilderness at night, one keeps company with the stars.  They are never more visible, never more primary, and never more operatic.  There are no street lights or buildings or ambient lights to interfere with their radiance.

Crazy Horse loved sleeping out under the stars, as did the poet Li-Po in China, 1200 years earlier.  Both men had a communion with nature that is best described as spiritual.  The poet, Li-Po, would be reduced to tears at the sight of the constellations.  Crazy Horse wore three hailstones painted on his forehead because he believed they were of the stars.
They guide us and move us to poetry and song and paint and dance.

Years ago I did an Artist in Residence in Missoula, Montana.  They put me up in a Double Tree Suites place right next to the Bitterroot River.  It was early winter/late-autumn and the colors were muted, russety reds, ochres, firey yellows, as well as plum-colored leaves that were as furiously sad as a Guy Clark song.  It woke me to the idea of making work rooted in nature.  This was kind of a new idea to me.  I’d always drawn birds, but never the land itself.  Some of my favorite art were Charles Burchfield’s watercolors, Arthur Dove’s bloody suns, John Marin’s scratchy and earthy mountain-scapes and the sublimely lovely Marsden Hartley paintings.  But until then I’d never seen myself as being able to cobble together works about nature.

While I was staying there, the woman at the hotel desk informed me that at four the next morning there would be a meteor shower, and if I’d like to see it, she’d give me a wake-up call and I could walk out next to the river and witness one of nature’s most amazing light-shows.  True to her word, she woke me up at 3:30 and I made some coffee. . .

I walked out to the river with five or six other guests and watched–and was astonished. The stars and comets were dancing a ferocious dervish in the black sky.  I thought it’d be one or two shooting stars; this was the sky moving like amphetamine-laced neon light.  I’d never seen anything like it.  I had the thought that I knew what people meant when they said the stars spoke to them.

These thoughts loomed large in my head when I thought about the work I’d been making about Crazy Horse and the monument still being carved out of Thunder Mountain to “honor” him.

I thought that the greatest, and most resonant monument one could build for him is already there; the stars, the river. . .the mountain itself.

It is hard to imagine what shooting stars would have meant to someone so attuned to nature, as he was.  To Crazy Horse, the sun was the Almighty; and one did not curse the rain or the hail or the blinding white winter.  It was nature, and this combination of forces, or spirits and the Creator were all the same thing.

On my way back from L.A., me and my pal, Stan, drove through Apache, Navajo, Hopi, Cherokee and Blackfeet land.

In Carl Sandburg’s, “The People, Yes“, the poet claims that, “The people know what the land knows,” and implies, just like Native American cultures do,  that the land itself        has a memory.

This thought is not hard to believe crossing the Black Mesa and the high desert.  It is unforgiving and thorny, beautiful, fierce, spiky and haunted.  It is a land of shooting stars, thick poisonous snakes, abandoned towns and absolutely no mercy.

Girl of the Emerald Sky

It is that time of year again.  Miami has allowed the circus of mental defectives that comprise the art world to pitch its tent on South-Beach.  Every mouth-breathing, social misfit in the country has strapped on the fake tits and spray-on tans and found the most outre-retard outfits to promenade down Collins Avenue and engage in the casual brutality of the art market.

Boo-yah.

I stopped going to these things a couple of years ago.  They are not much about art.  They are more about skin and money and the ambitions of a culture of squishy people who fancy themselves as “taste-makers.”  The parade of jerk-offs checking their Blackberries in full view of a gorgeous ocean makes one despair of the species.  The hookers, male and female, will make a killing, a ballerina or two will get shit-faced on free vodka and go skinny dipping in the pool at the Delano.  Art stars will be made and unmade, and the dealers will lie about how well sales are going in order to keep the one-ball juggling act known as the economy up in the air.

The art-world worker bees will man booths and realize hour after mundane hour that, in this end of the pool, this is all there is.  Success at an art-fair is at best a Pyrrhic victory.  The swells like you, and this doesn’t mean you’ve achieved anything like art.  In fact, it often means the opposite.  Not that there is no profit in being “fashionable”; there is a whole dearth of talent slaying cash right now.  Celebrity -types will wander the aisles with their dealers in tow, verbally fondling each other’s sacks and air-kissing up a storm.  It will be a daisy-chain amounting to nothing lasting.  A well-lit nowhere.

Have a daiquiri for me and tip the fucking waiters, you cheap pricks.

I leave for Los Angleles on Monday.  Me and Stan Klein are driving out there.  On the way, we’ll stop in the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest  and Joshua Tree, where I haven’t been for 28 years and the last time I was there I was tripping, so I haven’t really seen it.  This route was well known to hoboes and Native Americans.  This was the land of railroads, Indian wars, wildcat oil-men, and absolutely no mercy.

The Southwest’s history, like the rest of American history, is written in blood and dirt and oil.  Land settled, land stolen, dirt lived for, dirt died for.  Over the history of the world, wars have been fought over land, gold, oil, emeralds, jade, tobacco, tea and flesh.  You name it; we’ve killed for it.  There is an idea in Japanese and American poetry that insists that the land has a memory.  And I believe this.

Girl of the Pachinko Garden

In Tokyo, particularly in Roppongi and Sinjuku, there are Pachinko parlors everywhere.  They are kind of like the American equivalent of slot machines; a pinball-like game where one wins tokens that can later be exchanged for prizes, or, if you know where to go and who to talk to, cash.  They remind me of Vegas casinos with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Pachinko machines lined up one right after the other.  They make the same metal-machine, twinkling music that the slots do and are wildly popular in Tokyo.  Gambling is not legal per se, but there is plenty of gambling involved with Pachinko, and the same gambler’s etiquette applies here–do not touch another player’s steel balls.  It is best to sometimes “wait out” a machine that is due for a pay-off,  just like the slots.

What I love about Pachinko parlors is the atmosphere; lots of low-hanging, hazy smoke and orange-y light, like an old American pool hall or an Edward Hopper painting.  The lifers play two or three machines at once, the only noise being the clinking tinkly music of the machines themselves; sometimes hundreds at a time and the cacophony of sound oddly beautiful; the loose-change music of chance.

A lot of these joints are owned by the Yakuza, and those guys are always present.   You can pick them out of a crowd.  Black, tailored suits, black ties, white shirts and and hair-cuts that run the gamut from Elvis-type pompadours to the ‘fade’ cuts favores by Rappers in the late 80’s and shades– always shades, noon or midnight.  Often they will be playing the machines as well.  There is an unmistakable gangster-chic aura about these places.  Some of them have American dance music piped in softly, or  muzak-style rap that has none of the curbside urgency of the American variety.  Everybody smokes.  Women play this game with as much ferocity as men do.   Invariably a door or two down from the parlor is a shop where the tokens can be redeemed for prizes and then the prizes for cash in the black market.  Everything from motor-scooters to knock-off Rolexes can be won playing Pachinko.

I found the places I visited to be mesmerizing in their activity.  Watching a good Pachinko player is as much a treat as watching a good poker player or chef.  Virtuosity in anything is rewarding to observe.

These places are especially gorgeous at night when the night people come out to play.  There are dramas and narratives criss-crossing in every parlor; an unspoken language of nods, winks, gestures and half-smiles, and it all means something.  What?  I can’t guess, but it makes my wheels turn and then I want to make pictures.

Girl of the Winter Stars

Every once in a while I think I make a signature piece ñ one of those that kind of sums up what I’ve learned lately.  In Japan I began to like how they just slap graphics and type over images, I loved the chaos of it all.  My critics have long slammed me for putting too much information in my work–fuck ‘em.  They’ve never much had any idea how I think of how I see the world, which is everything happening at once.  History is not something that happened a hundred years ago; it is something that is happening now, in a million different places, to a million different people, for a million different reasons ñ for better or worse, this is how I think of the world.  I just try to hang on to the end of the kite-string and find a salient lesson or two in all of it.  In Japan, the chaotic visual is not frowned upon; beauty is where you find it.

I love drawing female figures . . . nothing better.  If I could draw birds and naked women the rest of my life, I’d be just fine with it.  In Japan the natural world and sensuality are part of the same poetic construction.  The Japanese are completely unafraid of color and in Japan I decided to let my palette off of the leash and just have at it.  I’m glad I did.  A year ago I was making love poem pieces with small silhouettes of this figure; I love this shape.  The playful carnality of it keeps my attention while I’m drawing.

I scored a bunch of gorgeous Japanese paper while I was in Tokyo and then, when I got back, a lovely designer named Kazumi brought me a bunch more; all of it rhythmic and suggestive of nature and natural forms, which repeats itself in Japanese design and poetry and music.

I went to Japan to let something new into my work.  My whole artistic output has been wholly American and now it is time to get a whiff of the big world.

Pink Lady

1-1/2 oz gin
3/4 oz applejack
1/4 oz lemon juice
1-2 dashes of grenadine
1 egg white
maraschino cherry for garnish

Voila! The Pink Lady!

A perfectly wretched cocktail first made in the 1930s, designed with the idea of separating young women from their virtue.

I new a prim and pert girl in high school named Elizabeth who would leave heel-marks on the ceiling after two of these abominations . . . followed by twenty or so, minutes of ruinous projectile vomiting.  Two Pink Ladies would induce nymphomania and nausea with equal ferocity.

In Japan. these girly drinks are very big, as is Karaoke, some bars locking you in from midnight ’til five in the morning to try out your pipes on classics like the Divynyl’s “I Touch Myself” and Meatloaf’s, “I Would Do Anything For Love.”  Lots of cocktails are added for intestinal fortitude, as well as to clear one’s throat.

There are many oddball names for things in Japan for products aimed at the American trade.  There are also stores that sell unusual things that can best be described as niche tastes.  We found a store that sold nothing but John Lennon glasses; another that only sold pink lingerie, bras, panties, merry widows and thongs, all in varying hues of pink, from baby powder pink to screaming-hooker fuchsia.  In Harajuku there are all manner of stores selling the baby-doll pink tights to teenage girls, as well as the ubiquitous “Juicy” sweatpants that only women going at least two bills seem to shoehorn their ample asses into over here.  Sorry baby, if you tip the scales at 200 pounds, you’re not exactly the “Juicy,” tight-clothing wearing demographic.  Yesterday, a plus-sized gal was power-walking down Damen Avenue sporting a cameltoe you could lose your keys in.

In Japan eroticized images have been around for centuries, as well as brutal and aberrant varieties of porn and comics.  The female figure is at once revered and fetishized, not so differently than it is in religious art and American skin magazines.  Who can blame us?  There is nothing as beautiful as the female body.

As a kid, I made the nuns crazy because I loved drawing naked women.  They would go bat-shit and send me to the shrink, call my mother and make me go talk to the priest.  I started drawing naked nuns and then they really went out of their minds; one of the brides of Christ beating my ass with a knotted rope, telling me I was going to hell.  I remembered saying I was feeling that it would be okay to go to hell, as long as there were naked women.

Girl of the Falling Planets,

I’ve written a lot of love poems.  This one is kind of a love poem for Japan or, more specifically, Tokyo.  It is seductive and full of secrets . . . like a woman.  It is probably a metaphor that would perplex most Japanese ñ a very male-dominated society.  The women I spoke to in Japan seemed sadly resigned to, at some point in their lives, becoming part of a man’s life as almost chattel.  Some of the young women, who worked at the hotel I stayed at, told me that their mothers and their fathers encouraged them to find a man, rather than pursue an education or a business of their own.  The encouraging thing in these conversations was that the women bristled at these thoughts.  One young woman, Sayaka, made it clear that her parents were going to have to realize that it was a new Japan; that the cultural revolution, acted out between young and old, had already happened, albeit quietly.  The young men did not desire to be salary-men and the young women wanted lives, careers and businesses of their own.  It is ironic to view this very old culture and think it has taken this long for young women to liberate themselves from old patriarchal customs and expectations.  Of course, many young women in Japan looked to American women as symbolic of the empowerment one can achieve in the new Japan.  The image of the passive and quiet Asian woman is a quickly disappearing stereotype.

In Japanese art there is no small amount of erotic content; the woodcuts and paintings of artists like Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi are full of geishas and courtesans.  Manga is full of some of the most brutal porn you’ll ever see, replete with rape-fantasy storylines that are degrading and sadly very common.  For centuries, women have very often been sex objects in Japanese art.  There are young women artists in Japan who are turning these paradigms on their head.  Mariko Mori, who seamlessly cobbles together Eastern myths and Western cultural motifs, often makes videos and photographs using herself, more often than not, as a goddess.  Work like hers points to a newly realized “Girl Power” that emboldens other young women artists.  She is a big deal–a real role model to young Japanese women . . . a woman in control of her own art and her own image . . . a woman who owns herself.

I also found out that the cherry blossom season of spring in Japan is a time when many young men propose marriage.  It is a beautiful time of year when the blossoms are in full roar and the parks are full of bright, gauzy whites and pinks, plum wine and music.  It is a lovely thing in a lovely city.  This one is for Tokyo.

The White Lodge

As a kid, I remember seeing cars and trucks with dead deer lashed to them in autumn.  Deer Season.  The men in our neighborhood would go up to Wisconsin or Northern Illinois and hunt whitetail deer.   The argument was always that without a certain amount of thinning the herd, the deer would starve during the winter, which seems a logical premise.  People ate the venison they harvested throughout the winter.  It was healthy, low-fat meat that was plentiful.

Still, it bugged me. The killing of deer seemed ugly.  Or shooting birds.  I never liked the idea  of it.  I’ve eaten plenty of venison and have liked it, but I don’t think I could ever look through a scope and pull the trigger on a deer.  It seems like a sin, like something that should be a crime.  I see them once in a while, walking placidly across a field out by the airport or on a ride up to Wisconsin, and they seem more mythic as I get older; more poetic. . .more like something to protect rather than bust a cap in.

I am not squeamish about guns.  I’m a firm believer in the right to bear and keep arms.  I am very pro Second Amendment . Hunting does not even bother me so much, though I choose not to do it.

Crazy Horse hunted buffalo with a bow and arrow.  Now, piss off a fully grown buffalo and watch how fast he stomps a mud-hole in your ass.  He also hunted antelope, deer and elk, all of them formidable creatures when wounded.

Often, roving groups of shit-heads hunt wolves from helicopters, with high-powered rifles, or hunt quail (which are about the size of a feather-duster and about as ferocious) with shot-guns on game farms, like Dick Cheney.

These tools are not without their comic value though.  At least once a year, a story surfaces that one of these Bwana-types gets snot-flying drunk and, despite the orange vest, blows the brains out of one of the other he-men in his hunting party.  Oops.  I often wonder if it is a cock-size thing that makes grown men go out and blast ducks out of the sky.  Really. . .what for?  Though I agree with Ted Nugent on the Second Amendment, I despair at the endless photos of him with some magnificent animal he has just killed.  To take this much joy in killing is psychotic.

At one time hunting to eat made sense.  Now hunting just seems to be an exercise in cruelty.

The Black Petals

There is a lovely flower store across the street from my studio called Larkspur.  My friend, Beth Barnett, owns it.  Sometimes when it is gray and shitty in Chicago, which is about eight months a year, I go over there and marvel at the color and smell of her daily inventory of flowers and plants . . . it is one of those pleasures that I live for.  She has things other stores don’t–anemones, Vanda orchids, Calathea plants–the stuff nobody else much cares about.  This store is a revelation; it always cheers me up.  I bought a Calathea plant there last week because I wanted to draw its black and purplish leaves.  It is from Brazil and is often a mourning plant, a plant given at times of death, much like the Irish giving lilies.  I thought it perfect for the mournful and autumnal life of Crazy Horse.  Black petals as deep and rich as crude oil, or night in the Badlands.  Calathea does not grow within 2,000 miles of the Black Hills, yet somehow, it is fitting.

I was in New Orleans last week where everything grows and overgrows; flora and fauna incessantly trying to reclaim the place.  I was there for these panels sponsored by Louisiana Artworks, speaking to young (and some not so young) artists about how to enter the world as artists.  I became acquainted with some wonderful emerging talent that really deserves a bigger audience.  I was touched at how, in the middle of the shittiest art-economy I can remember, these kids were full of optimism, energy and desire, how they evince an undefeated kind of spirit in the face of no small amount of adversity.

I came back to a Chicago in the full thrall of autumn with the trees and bushes changing colors; gorgeous fiery yellows and russet reds, burnt ochres and umbers and oranges.  This city is never more beautiful than in the fall.  Soon it will be time to turn the clock back and it will be dark at 4:30 in the afternoon, which will bum me out.  I don’t get Daylight Savings.  What the fuck are we saving it for?  Autumn is sad in the same way finishing a good book is, you don’t want it to end.  Winter is cruel in Chicago and at times it is easy to believe that cruelty is the true nature of this city’s heart . . . it can be a heartless motherfucker.

The Snake Planets

I love snakes.  As a kid, I had many boas, corn snakes, fox snakes, and once a speckled king snake that was as beautiful and lithe as yellow-dotted fine silk.  It was truly lovely.  I love drawing snakes as they are kind of one fluid line that curls and loops, never achieving an actual angle. Snake lines just kind of walk around on the picture-plane.

I worked in a pet shop in high school that dealt largely in exotic reptiles.  The guys who ran this place were also collectors of reptiles and falconers.  They were fascinating guys who knew a lot about nature and natural history.  They were especially adept at getting rare, barely-legal kinds of reptiles, including rear-fanged poisonous snakes and odd specimens like the Spilotes snake, which was a gorgeous black, yellow and white, and crazy-fast.  He was also a very big (six feet) and ill-tempered motherfucker.  This pet store was a wonder to me.  We got ferocious monitor lizards, as well as gentle chuckwallas and iguanas, one of which grew to be five feet long.  For me, though, the snakes were the treat.  KWI Pets got everything from reticulated pythons, Burmese pythons and rosy boa constrictors to shimmering black Indigo snakes that moved like liquid poetry.  It was a great place to work.

There is much lore surrounding snakes in Native American culture.  They are harbingers of storms, earthquakes and floods, as well as an ominous symbol of the near proximity of enemies.  It is a bad foreshadowing of things to come if one senses that the snakes are angry.  The lowly snake is able to feel the earth with its belly and is, therefore, a powerful spirit.  Horses are scared shitless of them . . . the snake is a powerful talisman.

Years ago I traveled the West and came upon a diner in Wyoming that had a tank full of prairie rattlers outside of it; big heavy-bodied, sons-of-bitches who love-you-not.  I thought they were SO boss, this glass box full of godless, undulating, death writhing in red dirt.

Ever since Christianity put the stink on snakes, they’ve been a symbol of the outlaw, the sexual, the other.  What I always loved about them as a kid was that they scared the shit out of everyone.  I used to taunt little girls with garter snakes that I’d caught.  One day I found a girl who was not the least bit scared of snakes–Kim Florence.  We were in fifth grade and she had more snakes than I did.  Naturally, I fell madly in fifth grade love with her; she was my first girlfriend.  She later kissed me off for a boy with dirty hair and a guitar, but my love for snakes and their dangerous kind of cool went unabated.

In Texas every year, a bunch of fucking Neanderthals get together and kill rattlesnakes by the thousands, even though they are among the most useful of creatures eating mice, rats, gophers and even other snakes.

Many Native American tribes have “Snake-Dances” that celebrate the power and mystery of these amazing creatures.

Winter Crosses

Winter in the Badlands is, to say the least, formidable. The wind, hail, snow and freezing-sideways-rain can create a whiteout in seconds.  It is one of those landscapes where nature truly has the ass over you.  When he was alive, Crazy Horse used the unpredictability of nature and the vagaries of landscape to his advantage in warfare and hunting.  He knew where his enemy and his prey would be in any given weather because he knew what the land knew.  Winter made hunting easier because the deer, antelope and buffalo had nowhere to hide and had to move constantly to forage for food.  Winter was also very hard on the tribes of Native Americans.  Water would freeze, fires would have to be kept perpetually burning in order to stay alive, which would in turn alert enemies as to their location.  It was a perilous time of year for man and animal.

The cross motif present in much Native American art is not Christian, it represents the four directions, or the four winds, as my friend Mark Turcotte told me.  Mark is the great Chippewa poet I’ve known for years who has been a huge help in directing me toward what to read and look for when making these offerings.  I’d been perplexed by the presence of so many crosses and had thought that maybe this element had been introduced by missionaries before they aided in the systematic attempted genocide of the American Indian tribes.  As far as we know, Crazy Horse’s deities were rooted in nature.  Like many Native American tribes, he regarded the sun as the Almighty.

In battle Crazy Horse adorned his forehead with three hailstones and red lightning bolts on each cheek.  He also carried a small pebble or hailstone behind his ear.  These images were powerful talismans in his life and visions.  When it would hail, the Native American believed it was raining stone and, depending which text you read, this was alternately ominous and hopeful at the same time.

Natural phenomenon is almost always present in Native American art and textiles; weavings and blankets and rugs and bold patterns that reflect the temperaments and shapes of landscape and seasonal shifts.

The last time I was in the Badlands, I was aware of nature as a presence, as an entity.  It is a powerful place charged with our most shameful histories, those sad resolutions of tribal fates that have forever etched regret into our American psyche.

The Deer Music

In Larry McMurtry’s splendid Crazy Horse, the author does something really smart, he measures what Crazy Horse means to his people and to us as Americans.  Little is known about Crazy Horse, despite the iconic presence he is.  McMurtry does not indulge any speculative history; rather than this, he carefully crafts an enigmatic and towering definition of who Crazy Horse became in history’s wider lens.  Instead of perpetuating the myth-writ-large, McMurtry, with the skill of a surgeon, explains our complicated history with the legacy of this odd man.  I’ve always admired McMurtry’s writing and while I was never much interested in Western things before or Texas so much, Lonesome Dove changed all of that for me and I became a rabid fan of Mr. McMurtry’s novels.

One of my aims in making these meditations on Crazy Horse is not to convince you I know a lot about Native American History or Native Americans.  I don’t.  I am a white guy who is fascinated by the problematic history and wanderings of one iconic Native American, Crazy Horse.  He was an odd man who was not very comfortable as a leader, or a member of a tribe, or even as a man.  He was a seeker of spirits, of nature, which are pretty much the same thing in this particular body of work.  Do I feel a kinship with him?  Not really.  He was at heart a loner, happy out wandering in nature, hunting deer, elk and buffalo, sleeping in caves and under the stars.  I am an admirer of his courage and otherworldliness.  I feel greatly for those who will only be like themselves.