A pause in the breath, a break in the stride...on second thought.

less than two weeks until the gator trail 50k.

Meanwhile the past week has been a physical disaster and my body remains slumped, choked, uncertain. It began with thai take-out, green curry with eggplant, bamboo, tofu, to be followed by 48 hours of misery, my body folded horrendously into itself, an internal meatmash out of a sinclair novel. . .the running rhythm collapsed and my 50 mile week decayed to a 17 mile week with my longest run being a struggling eight miler on Sunday (where I learned that I do not like body-warmed strawberry-banana gu gels). I am left with one more week-long cycle of running and a three day ween before my first 50k will spin its own organic experience, a free-form narrative finding its own pace and tone and extemporaneous momentum. . . the layers of self will be pulled back to some raw core where paint and language and trail and solitude and music will fall away into a pure act, an act perhaps approaching ascetic in its surrender for a brief moment. . . a passage of satori at mile 27 would be nice.

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completing any path of any distance is ultimately putting one foot in front of the other and breathing and having patience and the guts, pushing the mind-- pushing the legs...feet grinding out bones and blisters across the increments of space. Covering miles requires an actionable faith with multiple layers of belief and drive, the ability to push through physical burnouts, to endure the emotional upheavals, to fuel an engine of physical mantras. It's the drive to complete something no matter how anonymous and strange and personal. . . running a 31 mile circuit on a trail in the middle of the woods is an abstract art and few others will give any attention to this spiritual/physical/mental work; long-distance running is not a universal goal.  But this is my experience and its culmination, a distinct passage in my life fugue.  Running is my time of recreation, a time to reclaim, my time to Re-Create. Its a binge, its a purge, a tribal sundance, a sweat lodge.  A run as in Life. Putting one foot in front of the other and following through, into the nexus and the core, into a continuum, into an actionable faith and self-reliance.

Darren Mulvenna's Upcoming Show at Brunswick Community College.

Darren Mulvenna will be showing his recent paintings in the Dean's Gallery at Brunswick Community College.  The opening reception will be 5pm until 6pm on Wednesday March 16th.

Mulvenna's work embraces the patterns of Nature both in subject matter and in the development of his paintings.  Layers of paint and imagery emerge and recede, darken, glow from within, intensify, push and fade; the process searches out harmony in the environment, seeks to distill a rhythm in visual essence.  The paintings seem to exist comfortably in their frames, content & still, before pulsing back out with something new.  Environments are familiar despite the disconnect from common appearance, his surreal landscapes being slightly abstracted (maybe skewed is a better word), moving and dancing like dream-images following a hike in the woods.  One recognizes immediately the living scenes, a bather swimming in an ebbing aquatic light, a female torso rapt in a transcendent light, a classical dancer juxtaposed in a brackish chiaroscuro.  Mulvenna's saturation of life, his vivacity, is cathartic in the vibrant palette and the easy imagery, his figures flying playfully across lush fields and schools of fish languidly pushed in current through a diptych.

Mulvenna's work is life affirming.  One can see his own efforts in connecting to Nature, in finding his place within the complex weave of things, and then transcribing that marvel into these paintings.  His work honestly derives from an artist searching for something that is universal and relate-able, and it does so with glimpses of beauty that elevate the viewer for a fine moment.

the rhyme of contrasts. . . . an inchoate ramble, a run in sand.

The rhyme of contrasts, the balance of paradox. 

(random thoughts of Howard Finster, painter-preacher.)

nc museum of art, the grand glass doors framed by polished bars of steel, arriving with apprehensions against the funky-lego rigidity of the post-renovation building, now counteracted by a trail wrapping the rolling raleigh landscape, the massive sculpted coils on top of a hill, rodin's le penseur with clinched bronzed toes.  inside were the greco-roman statues, beat and aged, marble torsos of grandiosity. renaissance imagery, the usual ascending christs and compassionate marys and serene martyrs, interesting for a glance. . . the nineteenth century european painters, their street scenes and plein air peintures, still lives of meat markets and aristocratic patrons, their mythologies of body.  the american painters, o'keefe to wyeth with some damned fine american landscapes. . . the impressionists, the impressionists. . . into the modern now, what i consider the relate-able, giacometti, richter, a room full of mid-scale rodins (iris, burghers, balzac, ugolino, etc) and a garden with heroic-scale works (meditation, shades). . . . salle, scully, liu, motherwell, a perfect kline. . . a furious landscape by a nc painter gayle lowry. . . ultimately the nc museum of art hosts a damned fine art collection, is a good day trip, and after moving the mind you can move the body on the easy nature trail of the museum park.

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arrived stagnant, tired, but left with energy, momentum, craving a new image-repertoire, craving to push a new pictorial vocabulary into paint-heavy canvas.
looking, collecting image-scraps, extending my visual vocabulary beyond michelangelo, the ny painters, the post-war german painters (some of my personal favorites and thus aesthetic ruts). art realigns the paradigm, invigorates the psyche, inspires cross-referencing across time and geographic impossibility, denies cultural polarities, pursues a continuum in the annals of creative energy, scripts connections against disparateness, balances the paradox of things, conjoins the sacred and the vulgar.  this is my perpetual essay: the myth of synergy, of the ephemeral, of the holistic in creative work.  a nexus, a fusion of experience and expression, mind body spirit. art resides as an exacting and necessary presence in all layers of the collective unconsciousness, a core of the experience of the eternal mortality.
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kline motherwell mitchell de kooning pollock twombly and the postwar german painters, beuys and polke, kippenberger, baselitz, grosz, hesse, auerbach, richter. . . . freud and rauschenberg and bacon, schnabel.  rembrandt rubens carravaggio michelangelo titian. . . . the power of rodin, a room of rodin casts. . . . eternal brutal humanity, cut in clay, hatched in paint, craving.
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millet in mind while running sand, the toil of foot-falls as digging slow miles across carolina beach state park, running steep sand mountains beyond sugarloaf on unmarked trails and into sunny point perimeter where pulling back into trails barely marked by deer, dogs, squirrels. . . . the push of isolated miles on a saturday morning, wife and baby three hours northwest and full sun in march wonderland of easy time.  
millet and the honesty of work, of harvest, of seed.  my body reels easy breath across vast stretches of sand and i feel a clarity of mind, a soundness of belief, a push of body which is mine and strong.

Run for Ray Trail Half-Marathon, 2011.

February 28th, dernier jour du mois. . . . hoooowwweeee!

Line up before HM/10k. the strangeness of the trail runner.

Run for Ray 2011 passed in ideal weather Saturday morning at Brunswick Nature Park with 230 runners kicking across the optioned distances of 3m, 6m and 13m. Folks paced and sprinted the dirt roads beneath the full sun, dogs pushed paws into dirt, and families greeted arriving families.  A map showed two loops across the trail-system with two dirt road out-and-backs for the HM distance, 70% being on raw trails, coiled and switch-backing through woods alongside Town Creek on pine-needled single-track, fast footing interspersed with some rough & technical patches, a varied trail to work through, as well as some quad-bashing incline/decline areas.  Coffee and bananas, a timing mat for B-tagged number bibs, a fine payne's gray shirt with a print of Ray Underhill popping a backside air (complete with rail sliders), and friendly exchanges preceded the line-up horn. Serious runners with pioneer builds and appalachian beards in shirts reading Uwharrie 40 miler and Umstead trail marathon flashed smiles, were jovial and kind, a good field of local trail talent. Directions were given, the countdown, and the galloping beat down the dirt road.  The mad pace of the front runners jammed out as I boosted through the first out-and-back, before the single track, trying to buffer my midpack position, to be unforced in pace.  At the trail head we fell into the pines and followed the serpentine wind through about three miles of woods, crossed the road (by a nice kayak launch) where the trail is kinked and slower, about 1.5 miles and then a short dig to hit another entrance onto a new trail which ran 1.5 miles and then poured out against the second out-and-back.   My early push was punishing my legs, acidic cement in calves and quads and my calories were low, but the woods were wonderful and the volunteers were encouraging.  At one point I was head-singing (to the faint tune of an 80's song) “when the quad detaches from the bone.”  I passed through the first loop, saw ky and the wife, and kept up the effort for the repeated loop.

mid-point with finish chute to right.  My wife:  "you looked a little rougher than i would've expected."

The race was a fast one with a front pack battle driving the winner to a 6m 22s pace, 40 seconds faster than last year.  My time was 1h 43min, a 7m 48s min/mile, which beat last years time by about 30 secs/mile.  My position in the field of 47dropped to19th from last year's 17th. An encouraging improvement, though I could've done better with more patience in the opening sprint.  Ray Underhill decks were the trophies for top three finishers per race, and the organizers mingled and sought feedback for next year's run, throwing ideas for longer distances on these trails soon.  Very exciting prospects, and they get this race tightened down better every year.  My wife drove my wobbly body home and made pastas and coffee and let me move slowly with blisters like a fleshy mudslide on the balls of my forefeet before work at 3h30pm.

thoughts of twombly on trail. . .

twombly's paintings move like ancient graffiti, jungian scribble, the blurred collective unconscious to reference the historic ruins of rome, prague, chichen-itzy, jordan. . . to reference gardens, incinerated homes, auschwitz or sommes or pompei, glimpsing Socrates, sexual energies, entropy, earth. . . a nonlinear narrative told in spare forms and private marks, an enigmatic language of characters bearing embedded meaning, associations. . . twombly makes paint and the act of painting envelope a moment's essence, makes mark an embodiment of instinct, a physical impulse, and the energy of that mark is the signifier, the key, the universal register.  (See Turner, Pollock, Motherwell, Beuys.)  twombly is the erotic and the sacred and the faith within the painter's work.  Within the painter's work. . . the painter's Work. Faith.

i say twombly is the blur of the woods in a fast pace, mind reeling mosaic thought, st. paul & foucault & derrida, the multi-layered mindscape as pushing strides in miles, milling it out. . . poetry of movement & mind in rhythm with body, to find external awareness in internal struggle, clarity in imbroglio, finding language in noise. duchamp knew that the finest art was a chess game with a fabulously naked woman in a montparnesse cafe.  art is a nineteen mile run with s. sunday morning, down to dawn via airlie road & wrightsville beach, mind cycling the emptiness and fullness of the work, the alternating psyche that correlates to an act. . . transcendence, the freedom to exude and celebrate.  the faith to run or be still.

Art is the invigoration of perspective, art is the reminder to Look, art is the education and refinement of visual thought.

Laurel Nakadate and her video dates.

So I've become aware of the artist Laurel Nakadate, read an article in Modern Painters and watched an interview featuring the works which put her on the map. (You can and should visit her website http://www.nakadate.net/.)  A video artist who finished her grad work at Yale, Nakadate focuses her lens on random encounters with men. These men are not models, are not hot or chic, are often grotesque; they are the men one might find sitting alone at a mall, men populating craigslist, men ostracized by magazine culture and popular body-image into the fringe where they anonymously rot, the American men that are just lonely enough to participate in Nakadate's work. In short: Nakadate is slumming. A minimal (collaborative, she suggests) choreography allows the "date" to become its own thing, a spontaneous experience. One finds her dancing out some B. Spears tunes or spinning a man like a demented puppet while lasciviously cocking a hip with a curious non-expression on her face, an expression she might wear while reading Derrida.

In my efforts to understand the modern artist, the Modern Artist, from Hirst to Zhang to Koons or Kruger, I wandered into Ms. Nakadate's work with an open mind. As a man, as an everyman, I allowed a fascination with her ultra-sexy self-representation, her elevated sense of undergarment fashion, her salacious movements. But a self-consciousness surged and I swear Barbara Kruger yelled at me from a banner painting somewhere. Am I the guy dancing to “oops” by Spears on some level? Probably. And am I conflicted about that? Probably. Am I part of a youjizz culture? Probably. I am an element of the culture currently reclaiming fast sexuality, which will ebb and flow with the on the tiding myths of taboo and morality (the struggle of animalism versus intellectuallism). But Ms. Nakadate is not lewd, rather she is shrewd, an observant exotic dancer, an exhibitionist vixen, a narcissus, an false sexpot, a siren damning sailors against her shores. She is a snowglobe handicraft of our oedipal society. She is a beautiful echo, albeit in a direct gender reversal, of de Kooning's Women of the late 50's and the early 60's door paintings. She is the anti-argument to R. Prince's nurse paintings, which are much less cruel (in my male-centric opinion), her femininity equal in power to Prince's masculinity. Her art is an angst-driven frame-flip from Gauguin's Tahitian goddesses (and consequential death by syphillis), Ingres' Odalisque, even the demi-erotic representation of Biblical females in Renaissance imagery (Caravaggio, Titian, Michelangelo). . . there is little new here in terms of art and Humanity, just a simple reduction of the Male to a castrated gaping mouth that some women adore. She has taken de Kooning's horror-sluts into new domains and gender-reversed the anger with great alacrity, she has lined up a few guys in a comic book store with some masks and underwear and cobra-charmed them into les desmoilles d'avignon, les hommes d'avignon. And it is simultaneously a true and false representation, like mass media sexuality, like pop music, like line dancing, like this essay, like all art. 

A bend in the form with caravaggio, bach, dizzy miles, sleeplessness, post surgery.

insomniac scribble interlaced with lucubration.

Brunswick Nature Park overlook just off trail.

I'd started an essay on carravaggio, his madness and rage and death and how that torment was the architecture for his high renaissance beauty, but promptly quit to Brunswick Nature Park for a run and the morning was spring-easy and bright, with an optimistic goal for the morning run of 24k (~ 15m). . . a gel, a clifbar, a quart of h20 and a pint of gatorade stashed in the civic after a breakfast of banana and coffee, yogurt folded with nut & pommegranite granola, and my energy felt full and lucid. Gulp of coffee at 8h40am, cut off marley's soul rebel, set the garmin, and began to loosen the legs toward the trail head.  I wanted to savor the run, to mill out a slow clip of 10min/m or so, feeling the weight of my movement on earth as earth pushed back, a strengthening pace, and as oral surgery haunted tomorrow morning, I just wanted to run until the leg-labors reduced me to meat and easy breath and then shower and bach's fugues worked against fluid drawings of a twisted dancer, look at some modigliani, more caravaggio or baselitz before the night's shift. . . rodin's black drawings, erotic and bruised, pungent of the oils of fingertips and sex, pushing the mixture of ink and charcoal into heavy-toothed pages, joan mitchell's canvases so poetic and profound, minimal like a visual haiku. . . . slowly the trail wound around the stubbed woods shouldering Town Creek, black and still with a reflection of the surrounding evergreens barely broken by a ripple along her long reach, smooth like a lady's arm. . . . smells off the brackish stew where the root-knobs rose from the shallows and a dragonfly jerked in flight. . . abruptly the run got blurred, eyes wincing as if in allergy or irritant, and slowly a dizziness crept up and stalled on me, and I found myself experiencing some degree of tunnel vision as if in full exertion approaching blackout, the shrinking frame of vision.  Slowing, I pulled the pace to a jog, short kicks along the side of the creek, stretching the various ropes in my legs, reeling long drags of the fermented wood and freshly upturned earth, and I finished the trail to turn back towards the car, to jog back to point A, blaming dehydration or progressive fatigue. . . beating myself for a failing run, knowing runs would be restricted for several days, blaming the long work week with valentines rolling through our tables like a barrage, wearing me down perhaps more than I suspected. . . . drank half-water, half-gatorade, and hung around.  I walked to the picnic area, quiet and serene now, a cool breeze against mud-splashed legs, and began to really enjoy my presence, a sanctuary.  between thoughts, I got my head and heart anchored, and back into the woods I went, this time enjoying foot-play and the flittering birds shocking me back into it, back into the air, then thinking of picasso and his savage thanatost, his brutal beauty, monet's wonderment and pleasure in his giverny gardens, contemplated the kindred love of a plein air painter and someone running the woods, wondered if saint francis or basho would blame me for wanting to just run in this, gulping it in under legs and the senses peeled back raw beneath effort, or would they tell me to slow it down brother, be still. . . . dharma bums & desolation angels. . . but running, exertion, its an exorcism, its the struggle  the push  the suffering, and it brings the Core back into focus, reads clearly the private language in the Landscape, the private calligraphy of long runs alone in God's land, and yet as I write this, re-experiencing the deep stomach horrors of hunger and narcotics, post-surgery blues at 4h43am, bloody gums adding ferric bite to my strongest coffee, the tastes of decay, and the narcotics back in the system is unpleasant even if temporary, to eat a pill first thing this insomniac pre-dawn, crawling out of the twisted bed, self-medicating, its all very depressing.  a moment of despair, of tears, probably the result of the narcotics themselves, and no sleep all night, laying beside my wife, who sleeps well and deeply while kyote coughs and I am trying to think interesting thoughts, trying to be okay, to let my body relax into sleep, to ignore the bloody belches, the headache, the medicine tastes behind the sour-iron breath, and i've had many days such as this, but not in a long time, not in years, and I wish I could run, reclaim this mess of a body, so quickly lost. The bend in the thing is purely temporary, and I reflect back to the run where my goal of fifteen miles distengrated into seven miles and struggle not to read it as some metaphysical layer, some metaphor, a horrible prophecy. caravaggio.