hanging

i'd been considering this post for a good while now, smart and politically savvy, with videos that make today's washing machines look like miraculous sea creatures, and doing laundry appear similar to dancing the ballet. oh give me a break, i'd think. a chore is a chore. etc. then i saw this poem, and my vision was changed.

THE WASH

A round white troll with a black, greasy
heart shuddered and hummed "Diogenes,
Diogenes," while it sloshed the wash.
It stayed in the basement, a cave-dank
place I could only like on Mondays,
helping mother. My job was stirring
the rinse. The troll hummed.
Its wringer stuck
out each piece of laundry like a tongue--

socks, aprons, Daddy's shirts, my brother's
funny (I see London) underpants.
The whole family came past, mashed flat
as Bugs Bunny pancaked by a train.
They flopped into the rinse tub and learned
to swim, relaxing, almost arms and legs
again. I helped the transformation
with a stick we picked up one summer

at the lake. Wave-peeled,
worn to gray, inch
thick, it was a first rate stirring stick.
Apprenticed on my stool, I sang a rhyme
of Simple Simon gone afishing
and poked the clothes around the cauldron
and around. The wringer was risky.
Touch it with just your fingertip,
it would pull you in and spit you out

flat as a dishrag. It grabbed Mother
once--rolled her arm right to the elbow.
But she kept her head, flipped the lever
to reverse, and got her arm back, pretty
and round as new. This was a story
from Before. Still, I seemed to see it--
my mother brave as a movie star,
the flattened arm pumping up again,

like Popeye's. I fished out the rinsing
swimmers, one by one. Mother fed them
back to the wringer and they flopped, flat,
into baskets. Then the machine peed
right on the floor; the foamy water
curled around the drain and gurgled down.
Mother, under the slanting basement
doors, where it was darkest,
reached up that

miraculous arm and raised the lid.
Sunlight fell down the stairs, shouting
"This way out!" There was the day, an Easter
egg cut-out of grass and trees and sky.
Mother lugged the baskets up. Too short
to reach the clothesline, I would slide down
the bulkhead or sit and drum my heels
to aggravate the troll (Who's that trit-

trotting...) and watch.
Thus I learned the rules
of hanging clothes: Shirts went upside down,
pinned at the placket and seams. Sheets hung
like hammocks; socks were a toe-bitten
row. Underpants, indecently mixed,
flapped chainwise, cheek to cheek. Mother
took hold of the clothespole like a knight
couching his lance and propped the sagging

line up high, to catch the wind. We all
were airborne then, sleeves puffed out round
as sausages, bottoms billowing,
legs in arabesque. Our heaviness
was scattered into air, our secrets
bleached back to white. Mother stood easing
her back and smiled, queen of the backyard
and all that flapping crowd. For a week

now, each day, we'd put on this jubilee,
walk inside it, wash with it, and sleep
in its sweetness. At night, best of all,
I'd see with closed eyes the sheets aloft,
pajamas dancing, pillow cases
shaking out white signals in the sun,
and my mother with the basket, bent
and then rising, stretching up her arms.

Sarah Getty

From The Land of Milk and Honey, by Sarah Getty,
published by the University of South Carolina Press, 1996.
Copyright © 1996 by Sarah Getty. All rights reserved.

released

RELEASE

With rod and tackle box,
I'm slogging through soft sand,

a red sun going down in the surf,
swag-belly clouds drifting in

with Ray, only two months dead,
going on about girls that summer

we studied French in Québec and
guzzled Labatts at the Chien d'Or,

about how he'll marry again, keep
at it until he gets it right—
Pas vrai?

Above the tide wrack, a woman
in a two-piece with half my years

kneels struggling in the sand
with a pillow of feathers,

one wing flapping—a pelican
tangled in fish line, treble hook

in the bill pouch,
the other in its wing.
Ray says, Ask her out for a drink

but she says,
Could you give me a hand?
I drop the tackle and secure the wing

while she croons to calm him and
with one free hand
untangles the line.

With pliers from the tackle box,
I expose the barbs and carefully clip,

a total of six loud snaps.
Then I hold
the bird while she frees
the last tangle

and we step back,
join the onlookers,
a father explaining care to his kids.

The pelican now tests his wings, rowing
in place. He looks around and seems

to enjoy the attention, just as Ray did
in bars, buying drinks and telling jokes.

But this college boy with a can of Bud
is no joke and says they watched it flap

all afternoon
from that deck on the dune.
His buddy agrees with a belch

that buys a round
of frat boy laughter.
Ray tells me the kid needs his clock cleaned

just when the pelican waddles up
and puts his soft webbed foot on mine.

He tilts his head to
catch my look, then
flapping runs into the air,
tucks his feet,

and climbs, turning over our small circle,
before heading west. Dazzled and dumb,

I'm faintly aware of the woman,
then gone,
weightless and soaring over water, looking

down on myself slogging through sand,
certain that I'm being watched,


if only by another self
who will have to tell how it happened.

Peter Makuck

From Long Lens by Peter Makuck. Copyright © 2010 by Peter Makuck.

birds of a feather....

...can now

get married

in New York!

it just got better

second hand rose

simultaneous with ukiyo-e, was chiyogami, printed with woodblocks, just like the prints.

one story has it that the prints were "discovered" as they were used as wrapping paper; chiyogami was created as wrapping paper!

considered as decorative rather than narrative, the collections and comments are far rarer than are those for ukiyo-e. i'll recommend some great books; if you want the whole story, it really is all over the internet.

it was used for bookbinding and toy-making as well as for wrapping gifts. when i first saw chiyogami, i felt aha! i have found the missing link.

but researching this post, at this moment in my life (of which there is always one), has opened up in me more questions than i would ever answer.

and i ask, should i always want to? the brain may wonder, and allow that to be it. does everyone have to be a scholar?

perhaps i will list some of the questions: why is all of the western design i see so orderly? do the japanese prints seem orderly to the japanese?

why do color combinations and print pairings seem so often off-kilter to my eyes; we would never wear that print with that one. see all the kimono prints. do the japanese see the west as having an odd sense of color and coordination in a look?

what about the wiener werkstatte allowed more chaos in design than other western styles of the time? why do a blog? to look things up in wikipedia or books? to parrot informative information?

why have we insisted upon answers and orderliness? have we understood anything about the japanese at all? stop thinking.

just.

stop.

don't tell me it isn't happening

NEW

The long path sap sludges up
through an iris, is it new

each spring? And what would
an iris care for novelty?

Urgent in tatters, it wants
to wrest what routine it can

from the ceaseless shifts
of weather, from the scrounge

it feeds on to grow beautiful
and bigger: last week the space

about to be rumpled
by iris petals was only air

through which a rabbit leapt,
a volley of heartbeats hardly
contained by fur, and then the clay-
colored spaniel in pursuit

and the effortless air
rejoining itself whole.

William Matthews

these are the sixteen kinds of irises that grow in my garden.
the ones with their names attached DID NOT BLOOM this year.
profuse iris, with, at most, one bloom.

i called the local experts,
and they said that they're hearing this from a lot of people;
i said that in 20 years this has never happened,
and they said that they're hearing about things
that haven't happened in as long as 100 years.

Don't Tweet That

People! It's a penis! Get over it!

behind 'the poster'

i had seen covers of this magazine, the poster, frequently around the web, and in my books, but no amount of searching seemed to turn up much of anything besides these hints. slowly but surely, i would collect one here, one there, whenever i'd come across them; suddenly, what did i know but that i had collected the cover images of most of them! much to my surprise! but not only that, i was taught once again, google something today, you don't find it, google it again tomorrow: one can now find the entire text of every article in the magazine's history (and all the visuals with paid services)!

so here, straight from the november 1898 issue of the poster:

JAPAN & POSTERS by CHARLES HIATT

IF imitation be the sincerest form of flattery, Japan, in matters of art, is now the most flattered nation in the islands, seen from this distance, seems world. Not so long ago, the appreciation of Japanese art was confined to a handful exquisitely informed amateurs such as the De Goncourts, and to a few artists, amongst whom Whistler was incomparably the most distinguished. Nowadays the cult of things Japanese has spread not only to Kensington, but even to Clapham and Brixton, and one would find it difficult to discover any self-respecting villa residence in London in the decoration of which nothing suggested the adorably graceful land of Hokusai and Outamaro.

It will be news to many people, even to some who are interested in the pictorial placard, that there are such things as Japanese posters. The life of those favoured Asiatic islands, seen from this distance, seems too idyllic to allow of the clamour of advertisement. And yet the picture-poster of is no new thing even in Japan : the idea of it, at all events, has existed there for ages, just as it existed in ancient Greece and Rome. To come to more recent times, we find that the first elephant ever introduced into Japan was advertised much as Barnum might advertise a new addition to his menagerie. The year in which the Japanese first saw the biggest of all beasts was 1729, and its arrival was heralded by a placard illustrated with a wood-cut coloured by hand. In addition to this, pilgrims to Japanese shrines were in the habit of leaving a memorial of their visit in the shape of little illustrated bills bearing their names posted on the wall of the temple, on much the same principle as the modern European cad cuts his name in the bark of a tree, or scribbles it on the wood-work of a railway carriage. Again, the Japanese theatres have for a long time been in the habit of exhibiting large panels on which are depicted the incidents of the plays performed and the counterfeit presentments of the chief actors engaged.

It is not, however, with the poster in Japan, but with the influence of Japanese art on the poster in Europe that this article is concerned. It is scarcely too sweeping to say that in some degree all the best modern illustrated placards including even those of Cheret, Grasset, and Mucha have been influenced by the Japanese colour print. In the work of some of the mâitres de affiche the influence is much more marked than in that of others. Amongst modern French poster artists none is more mordantly original than Toulouse-Lautrec : to accuse him of imitation would be merely absurd, and yet nearly all his great wall pictures show clearly that he has been a careful and ingenious student of Japanese work. At the first blush it would seem as if he owed his inspiration solely to a particular aspect of the life of modern Paris, but a closer observation reveals the fact that his best designs have much in common with those wonderful prints which are at once the delight and the despair of Occidental draughtsmen. His "Jane Avril," that delightful design which combines the hues of the crocus, the primrose, and the crimson tulip, is conceived in manner essentially Japanese.

In H. G. Ibels we have another Parisian who has drunk deeply at the well of Oriental inspiration, with results altogether charming and distinguished. Without sacrificing his individuality, he has learned not a little of his technique from the study of Japanese models. The same, in a less degree, may be said of Henri Riviere, if we may judge him by his three designs "L'Enfant Prodigue," "Le Juif Errant," and "Clairs de Lune." I might multiply on account of their subject matter they these examples almost to infinity, but could hardly fail to achieve a certain those which I have quoted are sufficient to illustrate my argument. In this connection, however, it is impossible not to mention Degas, the wonderful master of line, whose work has so much in common with that of the best Japanese artists. So far as I know, Degas has not yet made an essay in the affiche, but if he were to do so, we may be sure that he would produce something new and fascinating.

In this country the attention of the great mass of the people was undoubtedly first drawn to things Japanese by the "Mikado." Mr. Gilbert's amazingly felicitous excursion into the realms of topsey-turveydom did more to popularise the delicate picturesqueness of Japanese art and costume than a library full of learned treatises. The posters which advertised this production, though degree of prettiness, were thoroughly English, and, it must be added, thoroughly bad. Since then, however, the poster movement has taught our artists much, and when a second Japanese musical play was mounted they were able to give a much better account of themselves. They saw their opportunity and made the most of it. The "Geisha" was generously advertised, and much credit is due to Mr. George Edwardes for employing not one, but several of the ablest English designers in the preparation of posters to proclaim far and wide the delights of his new production.

The English theatrical poster a short time ago was one of the most crude, inartistic, and frequently brutal productions which the imagination and hand of man ever devised. The memory of it makes one shudder, and it is altogether pleasant to turn one's thoughts to the agreeably fantastic designs which lured us to Daly's Theatre when the "Jewel of Asia" was there for our amusement. It is almost unnecessary to say that the talent of Mr. Dudley Hardy was enlisted for the "Geisha." Mr. Hardy's versatility and ingenuity are only exceeded by his amazing industry. It is wonderful that he does so little that is bad. This Japanese bill is not amongst his happiest efforts: in manner and execution it is essentially English, and lacks the verve which made the bills for "A Gaiety Girl" so attractive. Mr. Edgar Wilson's poster for the "Geisha" was more fortunately conceived. The Japanese girl with her huge parasol is an excellent piece of work, and the colour-scheme, which includes glowing scarlet, bright yellow, dull green, and red-brown, is a very striking one. Even better is the design by Mr. John Hassall which, in the disposal of the pattern and in the graceful and naive arrangement of the details,recalls the Japanese colour print in the happiest way. In advertising the "Geisha," Mr. Will True proved himself a resourceful artist who possessed a fine sense of colour, and who was, in addition, a capable draughtsman. One of his bills is actually a Japanese print re-drawn and surrounded by a conventional border. It performed its primary business of advertising to admiration, and the wise collector will do well to add a copy of it to his treasures.

The other bill by Mr. True is graceful in line and harmonious in colour. The Japanese lettering, it should be noted, is an accurate translation of one of the songs in the “Geisha," and forms a most interesting detail of the placard. The collector has already seized upon the advertisement which Mr. Mortimer Menpes designed to advertise a recent exhibition of his pictures at Dowdeswell's. Although only in black and white, the spirited drawing of the figure makes a copy of this little poster a very desirable possession. I have before me as I write a window bill advertising a book entitled "A Cycle of Cathay," by Dr. Martin, first President of the Imperial Tungwen College, Peking. It is in black and white, and is adorned by a grotesque and vigorous Chinese figure well calculated to arrest the attention.

The foregoing is merely a rough note on a subject about which a good-sized volume might be written: it professes to be nothing more. If I have not touched upon the Japanese element in the masterly posters of the Beggarstaffs, it is only because I hope, at some future time, to be able to deal with the subject at such length as it deserves. Surely nobody will deny that the artistic invasion of England by Japan has, on the whole, been beneficial to our arts and crafts in general, and to the art of the poster in particular. It may be -I do not say it will be -that when the halcyon days of our admiration have passed, we shall not be inclined to estimate the art of Japan so highly as we do now. In the meantime, there can be no doubt that we are drawing from it much healthy inspiration, and not a few novel and entirely legitimate technical devices.

for more, see reVIEW's list of articles from 'the poster' here,
and here, for even more options.
and here, from the same people, a whole list of wonders.