Autumnal Equinox

Calhoun's Cannons for Sept 24, 20013

 Bang! A few days ago it was summer, the dogs stirring in the living room by 4:30 a.m., sleep over, sensing the sunrise, the lightening sky.  Then, comes the Autumnal Equinox and suddenly it's  6 a.m., it's still dark, and the dogs are restless and muddled;  Too dark for a walk, too late to sleep, so they loll and doze.  

How did that happen?  The den where I type faces east, the blinds open to the back yard.  The slightest lift in light is clearly noticeable as the great Mother Mallow plant's dusty leaves emerge from the gloom and the Great Grape Vine's topmost leaves high up on the back fence catch the first light of day.  But then, suddenly, no Mother Mallow appears when it should be appearing and I look at the clock.  Did it stop?  Why is it 6:02 and still dark outside?  When did that happen?

The suddenness shocks.  I guess that's why they call it "fall."  One day it's late summer, with its endlessly long days, then, Blam!,  overnight, the air smells different, crisp, breezy, cool.  And with surprising speed the fore and afts of the day begin and end with a rapidly closing darkness pressing in on both sides.  Is that Halloween around the corner?

And where did my summer go, anyway? This year the winter seemed to linger, our usual June gloom lasting well into July so that all the heavy-lift winter garden clean-up chores got pushed into all of the spring planting chores.  And when the sunny days finally came and the yellow Adirondack chair beckoned, I was hip-deep in pruned branches and pulled roots, rushing to get the garden into summer shape, no time to linger with a good book and the bees.

Finally, when the spring chores were done and summertime lollygagging beckoned, Boom! it was time to prune and prep for winter.  No summer. No chair.  No good books.  And the bees, hard pressed to find the few flowers left, began to head back to the hive for a long sleep.

I did manage to get a few cherry tomato plants into the ground where they ran amok, spreading out of their cages like some alien vegetable that ate New Jersey.  And before I could catch up to them, the great tumbling masses toppled over in a heap impossible to set right without breaking the vines.  So there the great green mound stayed for the rest of the season, seventy million little red globes tangled in the middle of the green muddle making harvesting a challenge. But harvest I did, colanders filled with tiny but tasty globes.

And like any deluded backyard farmer with the sudden crisp chill descending, I'm already plotting out where I might plant some zucchini next year, since it's easy to grow and also because I've now got a great recipe for curried zucchini soup. And, of course, more kale . .  and red Swiss chard. Maybe some pea pods? Pumpkins?  

And so the books wait.  The warm afternoons in a corner of the garden get pushed into

 . . . later.  Then, too late. Of course, this being California, there's one last parting gift to endure as the temperature suddenly spikes and sends the dogs under the nearest bush with their tongues lolling out, and the fierce hot Santa Ana winds blow out of the Mojave and the drought-stressed chaparral crisps and crackles and waits for a lightning strike.  Or some careless fool with a match.

California's own Pele must have her annual sacrificial pound of char before the soft rains of winter can come, before the Autumnal Equinox turns its face to the dark moon of the Solstice, before the night expands, and quietude of a different sort descends.  Too soon.  Too soon.  

Sunday Serendipity and a Sunday Poem

I recently stumbled on an epigram, a quote, an artist's statement, a passage that stopped me in my tracks.  It was among some papers I was in the process of recycling, and was by an unknown (to me) author.  What astonished me was the brevity and clarity with which it captured the "what" of what happens when you actively and willingly engage with a work of art -- the unexplainable and instant living communication that flashes between painting and viewer, poem and reader, music and listener. It's an electrifying process, a dialogue, really. In the vernacular, you "get it."  But the experiential process of "getting it" cannot be 'splained.  Indeed, the more you try to 'splain the "it" or the "what," or the "how," the quicker it disappears. The process is magical.  And magic, as everyone knows, needs a spirit of quiet, open waiting in order to work.

Here's the lovely quote, which, in its own way, is also a wonderful poem for your Sunday.

Art's capacity to elude cognizance is electrifying.  To require interpretation is to neutralize its charge; to be receptive is to experience its livewire. 
                                                                      Helianthe W. Stevig   

Blind Love

Calhoun's Cannons for Sept 19, 2013

 The US seems a country hell-bent on its own failure

                                      Clive Crook

Did you know that in Iowa, the very heartland of America, a legally blind man can go into a gun store and buy any kind of weapon he wants?  It's true.  And it's delicious to think about.  The white cane.  The guide dog.  The AR-15.  It's the perfect symbol for what America has become.

It's perfect because it's absurd, its potential for pointless, bloody death is extremely high, and nobody with a lick of sense seems to think that this was not a good idea.  That's because, in America, guns trump public safety, trump common sense, trump everything.  And the public's appetite for pointless, bloody death is still not slaked. Far from it.  Our blood lust seems limitless.

Twenty-two little slaughtered kids didn't do the trick.  Now, 12 more killings at the Washington Navy Yard hardly caused a ripple, except for the usual media hand-wringing: A few days of, Oh, Dear, sigh, well, nothing to be done, our hearts go out to the families, time for closure, let's move on. And we got a few days of the usual questions -- How did a deranged man get his hands on weapons without even a background check? The answers  remain buried in the back pages, but I'll give you a hint: With the NRA's help, all sensible gun laws have carefully crafted loopholes built in to them to make the laws basically moot -- mere window dressing to shut up the noisy grieving parents and heart-broken, outraged communities.

That's because, in a country that finds nothing absurd in selling guns to blind people, gun ownership trumps everything. After all, it's a "right," and "rights" can always be demagogued even into absurdity -- one town's mandatory own/carry law that forces even blind fools into being gun-toting vigilantes. What can possibly go wrong with that?

And so we plod on, the body count growing, day by day.  And that's clearly O.K. with us.  That's how much we love our guns.  More than our children, more than our fellow citizens.  So we pretend to write gun laws that are more sieve than shield, then shift the blame for the mayhem to video games and mental health and poverty and poor schools, all of which can be ignored utterly since doing something about those interlocked and complicated things will require higher taxes and a heavy-lift commitment to create (and pay for) a decent society.  So, that's off the table. Who wants a decent society when we can have a society that sells guns to blind people?

So America turns itself into one big "Jackass" movie.  Absurd, idiotic, with a high potential for pointless, bloody, sophomoric mayhem.  Which is why I now find myself turning the page and changing channels when news of another slaughter appears.  It's not "compassion fatigue," really.  More like "rerun fatigue."  It's all become annoying background noise, like a loud lawnmower motor on a quiet Sunday morning;  You know you can't do anything about it since your neighbor has a "right" to mow his lawn anytime he wants to, and his "right" to mow his lawn trumps your "right" to peace and quiet.  So you block the sound from your mind since nothing will be done to change the situation.  

It's a hell of a way to live, especially since We the People have the tools and the capacity to create a different country, but choose not to.  And so we end up with a country that sees no problem in selling guns even to blind people. And then keeps wondering why things keep going so terribly wrong.

       

And So Has The SLO Little Theatre

While you're theatre hopping, don't miss the new production of "Incorruptible, A Dark Comedy About the Dark Ages" at the SLO Little Theatre. ( http://www.slolittletheatre.org  ) It's playing weekends through Sept 29th (Friday night, two performances on Sat, one on Sunday afternoon.)

It's a deliciously snarky tale of a 13th century monastery that's in the relics biz but with one minor problem: their saint's bones seem to have lost their luster, miracle-wise, so paying pilgrims are taking their nice money and going to the next town over since that church's saintly bones are still curing sick cows and sick (paying) peasants alike.  Oh, what to do?

Well, an old bone's an old bone and our scheming band of monks soon discover two things: Churches all over Europe will pay good money for old bits of a saint that will attract paying pilgrims in need of miracles, and these sly monks have a graveyard full of old bones. Who's to know?

Before you know it, the monks are in business, their tattered homespun robes exchanged for silk, their sins multiplying like the coins in their coffers.

The cast  is splendid and up to the comedic game.  Keep and eye out for Rosh Wright as the" old peasant woman."  She's a talented, wickedly funny scene stealer if ever I've seen one.

The theatre's got their new season schedule posted.  It includes "Miracle on 34th St," in time for the Holidays (Nov/Dec), "Proof," "A Chorus Line," among others.  This theatre is one of SLOTown's gems.  They've come such a long way (a 60 year history) and are now drawing on a wonderfully wide pool of talent (PCPA, Cal Poly, Melodrama Theatre, retired theatre folks from L.A. who are lending their expertise and talent, our own homegrown talent), with a increasingly ambitious program.

Do yourself a favor.  Buy a ticket and head for the theatre.

PCPA's Done It Again

I've never seen a bad performance at Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts (PCPA). Located on the campus of the John Hancock College in Santa Maria, The Conservatory offers an exraordinary combination of student training and professional theatre.

The current production of "Clybourne Park" is absolutely first rate.  Written by Bruce Norris, the  2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning play is timeless and cunning in reminding us that, in America, the past is never the past. 

The play is a continuation of Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 "A Raisin in the Sun," the "what happens next?"  And the "next" is a fierce, and wickedly funny examination of race, real estate values and Whose narrative is it now?  It's a tour de force of writing, a high-wire act that teeters always on the knife edge of laughter and cringe, all carried off by a fabulous ensemble of actors in a tight, disciplined, dead-on-the-mark performance. 

The plot of the two-part play is simple:  A nice, decent middle-class couple, after the loss of their son (whose suicide haunts and informs the play) are selling their nice middle class home in a nice white neighborhood, and the buyer, as it turns out, is a black family.  In 1959.  And the nice, decent middle class neighbors are searching six ways to Sunday to discuss the implications of this sale (racism, white-flight, real estate values, "them" vs "us") without actually discussing the realities (racism, white-flight, real estate values, "them" vs. "us.")

Act two, fast forward to the present day.  Same neighborhood,  same issues, different color.  Now, the awkward, knife-edged discussion is racism, white Yuppification, real estate values, "community" and loss of "community, "them" vs. "us." And adding to the wicked comedic effect, the playwright has cunningly lifted a great deal of identical dialogue from part one, straight into part two; a mirroring effect that brings the shock of recognition. Same old.  Same old. 

In the program notes, author Norris observes, "One of the traps we fall into is the 'progress' trap.  We like to think there's some sort of linear progression toward a utopian ideal, and that each incremental or even superficial change we make is somehow part of a long march to this ideal universe."  Instead, we seem to tread over old ground, struggling to learn a new dance.

The play runs through Sept 29, at the Severson Theatre (the smaller, more intimate venue).  You can get tickets at (805) 922-8313 or go on line to www.pcpa.org

Don't miss this one. And, while you're on the website, check out their upcoming schedule, starting with Mary Poppins in November.  Perfect Holiday fare for the whole family.