In this blog we will share with you our vision of beauty, balance, harmony.

As Mark Leach writes in his book Raw Colour with Pastels: “Sound is all around us, and it is musicians who refine that sound into something of beauty. As a painter, I have always felt that my purpose is to craft colour in a similar way, to see through the confusion and seek harmony and beauty.”

And we add: Words, fragments of sentences, spoken noise is all around us, and Ken arranges words in such a way as to capture beauty in the accidental, the ambient soundtrack of life.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

California on my Mind

California on my Mind No. II 35 x 33 cm





WAITING IN LINE  

We’re having baby potatoes sprinkled with rosemary
 and thickened with cheese,
   broad beans and a kebab
invention, minus skewers, which are thought hazardous
   in our violent household.
That’s not true. We’re having beef burgers from Jolly’s
   they’re only fifteen-cents each
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is how the poor survive in America,
   a nose for the good deal,
a taste for bad food, solid stoic pioneer staying power
   making it less difficult to stand in line
   an hour for the pleasure of ordering ten beef four regular
fries one onion rings strawberry shake three cokes to go. You made friends
   in those lines, talked Giants Dodgers 49ers
   Buster Mathis beating the crap
   out of George Chuvalo on TV last night. Nureyev
   guest-dancing at the Frisco Ballet
wasn’t brought up by anyone, out of ignorance,
   out of indifference.
   Politics? No good news there, and yet

how I long for the year of Watergate. At least there was something
   interesting on TV. I’d cut school just to watch senator
Sam Erwin grill H.R. Haldeman, also known as “Bob”
   who’d let his crew-cut grow out
so he looked gentle and sleepy-eyed, and so soft-spoken you’d
never have known he’d once been King Richard’s Sturmführer 
and was not a nice guy in an apron most days, broom in hand,
   proud proprietor of the general store on Main Street
squint-eying your fifteen year old daughter semi-dressed in short-shorts
and then after him was Bob’s colleague big John Erlichman, which in German  
   means “honest man,” an irony almost
gross in its obviousness, or the preternaturally
tedious John Dean
with his overwhelming fear of being raped in prison
and whose wife’s hairdo was a masterpiece of sculpted platinum.
   She looked like a very sad Athena.
   What would a reunion be like? Bob
Haldeman, the two Johns, the Hairdo, and even Dick and Pat and Trish and
   the totally unmemorable  
David Eisenhauer(Trish’s squeeze), all of us lined up at Jolly’s, waiting our turn,
trying to think of something to say the others might understand.
   A few of us (ill-bred,
indiscreet, semi-rural suburbanites) might even ask those—those who
   qualified—what it was like being dead.




Romeo and Juliet, ballet by Kenneth McMillan
with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev
Music Sergej Prokofiev


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