White Meat or Dark?

Who are those horn-dogs hitting on you?
Imagine their arms done up in a stew!
Carve up their legs, or slice up some breast,
Singe off the hair from the hairy guy's chest!

What would you like? White meat or dark?
It's all very tasty, so long as it don't bark.
That hairdresser at work, she's seems very tenda’
I'm sure she has a thigh she'd gladly lend ya!

As far as my diet, do I give a shit?
I eat everything, every last little bit!
It all comes to me. . . sooner or later,
From the hair on your head . . to a distant alligator.
Even the planets I'll swallow like peas,
Hardly a speck, amidst galaxies.

I'll roast your enemies, I'll baste them with gravy
And if they speak Japanese I’ll pour on some baby!
We'll eat them all, both foreigners and Yanks.
Let’s break out the cranberry, let's all give our thanks!
A happy table to set, in these most trying times,
We'll all eat very well, if we forgive a few crimes.

MENU THANKSGIVING, 2006

Entrée:

Mediterranean Olives of Various Colors and Flavors in their own oil

Potato and Pea Samosas with Tamarind

Les Plats Principal:

Brine Roasted American Turkey with Sea Salt, Sugar Carrots Leeks Celery Juniper Berries, and Fennel

Tangy Cranberry Sauce with Orange Peel

Wild Rice with Chestnuts and Dates

Butternut Squash Ravioli with Orange Fennel Sauce

Parsnip Puree with Hazelnuts

Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Cinnamon

Crisp Roasted Golden Potatoes with Native Sage

Verdent Off Season Green Asparagus with Adirondack Pine Nuts

Roasted Portobello Mushrooms with Oak Forest Truffles

Green Salad with Honey Glazed Walnuts

Desert:

BBP's Warm Chocolate Tart Creation

Key West Rum Cake

Rustic Apple Tart

Georgia Pecan Pie with Ice Cream 

New England Pumpkin Pie with Whipped Cream

Apres:

Café American, Cafe Mexicano

Thé, Black or Green

Our Race

We're from a race that learned to fly,
But made no space for poetry.
A tribal kin who spoke in curses,
Lost its zen without notes or verses.

Such Pearls

      

As my pearls flow on your skin,

    Your sculpted figure loves to sin.
Hips so dearly made to love,
    Lips so clearly shaped above.
Your eyes as soft as blue turquoise . . .
   Were clearly made to torture boys.

Monsoon

The daughters of Bihar often take pains,
To plow fields naked, before the monsoon rains.
God showered raindrops, to cover these girls.
So custom works, in the rainy Bihari world.
And when the rain drops do finally fall,
Biharis get naked, daughters most of all.

Black Studio Bowl

This is the bowl I drink tea from most of the time at the studio.
It's an old one. . . . plenty of iron in the glaze. It holds a lot of tea.

Have you ever bathed in tea? Try it sometime, on a scorching hot day. Make a big quantity of hot tea in a big pot on the stove. Let it cool to a tepid temperature.

I make it with a base of oat or wheat tea, mixed with some black tea and herbals, like peppermint.

Run a shallow tepid bath, and pour it over yourself. Better yet, find someone beautiful to share it with! ;)

Every Monster Bird

Whatever ugly monster bird keeps dancing,
Curious passions hard, make rotten liars puny.

Whisper in my fire, please investigate why I see you,
Slither, dirty scab, here's an original wall to
manipulate money through red and violet.
Rascal, have better fantasies, giggle, to satisfy.
Know harmony..

Flashlight cat eyes I understand.
Drink, be cured. Cruise some underlying soul.
Understand, scratch our empty noses.
Sucker, celebrate your dirty vulture breath,
Or puke.

A woman's hormone cramps seem fooled.
Try to favor unknown kindness.
Meet, we'll know your fragile language.

Be the aesthete I'm wanting,
Cat fingers twinkle at me.
Destroy passion, always bring warmth.

Together we reconcile, and steal slippery desire.
But pressure will smile.
Psychology's instrument comes from number.

Who keeps your frivolity down?
Will emotions deal, help vary the experiment?
Wrath as he glitters, makes real love.

Clean witted space, a neighbor's name said,
Toast the righteous slippery encounter.
How a party kicks head and heart,
In your studio incarnate.






with Niki Rubin 6/23/11, 60, 61-1, 61-2, 62

The Muse Poems:

   1  2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Baldy Mountain Tea-bowl

I've named this bowl after Baldy Mountain, a very special place in the Adirondack Mountains.

The trail goes up the left side. It's steep! . . . Off the right side, there's a long gentle slope that leads down to the lake. The glacier came up over the top of it, from left to right, and tore boulders off the top and rolled them down into a heap. Those boulders are still there today, at least the ones that were too big for us as kids to roll down the mountain!

Baldy Mountain's not bald, though it used to be. There was a fire there years ago, and blueberries grew on top. My relatives used to go there to pick the berries.

Baldy Mountain's not even really a mountain. It's more of a hill, with a dramatic view of a beautiful lake.

You get winded climbing it though.

I'm going to hang onto this bowl until I can take it to the top, . .  and drink a cup of tea.

These are Cups

I made quite a lot of these small temoku cups a couple of years ago. They've all slowly disappeared, given away mostly. I suppose I'll have to make more.

There's not much to say about them. They're simple, elegant. They hold a mystery, which I shan't reveal.

But they're cups.

NOT a Tea-bowl

English simply does not have a good word to describe this shape.

Glass? Pot? How about ceramic?

I loathe the word ceramic. It sounds so dental, so clinical. It has an engineering ring to it. Keramik sounds East European, and the East Europeans are better at writing plays and making movies than engineering.

Let's face it, archaeology proves that the English were primitives. We took food from wood trenchers, and slurped grog from a mug!

Now mug is an interesting word. Older English ceramics had faces carved on the sides of 'mugs', Mug means 'face', and therein lies the clue to origin - at one point all vessels in Britain were wood, hollowed out of knotty pine. The knots must have come alive as faces.

You see the problem with 'vessel'? It can mean a ship, a pot, or an artery.

Now China, Korea, Japan, they've got a vocabulary for these forms! Endless language for fired clay. Thousands upon thousands of words.

It is a 'pot'. . .  pot is not a good word for something to drink from. Pot is a better descriptor for what we smoke, hence our resistance to change. We'll lose the only good word we have for shapes like this!

Pots are what we cook in, or store in. Hence a cooking pot, or storage pot. Pots are good for slow cooking, chili, stew, or ratatouille.

Beef bourguignon! For that the ideal pot is copper, not clay.

Poor old pot. Such a humble moniker. Pot happens to be half of my last name. William the Conqueror, I wish you'd stayed in France. My name might have been Pembroke, but because my grandfather happened to be making jars the day your minions took census, I got hobbled with Potter for a name.

English is so weak in this area - perhaps it explains why we drink from glasses, not pots.

[I often go looking for my glasses, so that I can find my pot!]

You laugh. This is no joke! Our language is deficient in artistic vocabulary! Now there's a word. Deficient! How could we have a word like deficient, but not a word for what this very useful vessel is.

Water vessel? No. Vessel sounds like something that's dripping, water cup sounds like something cheap you find at a well, that you get cholera from. Or something the doctor gives you to pee in.

A pot describes both what you eat from or sit on, or smoke. Not a precise word.

Definitely not a tub, bucket or cauldron. It's neither a can, or a bottle or a vase, though it could be used as a vase. It's not a jar. Jars have lids.

Can't be a teacup or a coffee cup. Without a handle one couldn't hold hot coffee or tea - you'd burn your hands. I guess the English never much enjoyed cold drinks.

It can't be a teacup, doesn't have a saucer.

Not a wineglass.

Can't be a coffee mug. Too light, no handle. Not good for coffee. Forget demi-tasse that's french for half-cup . . . this is probably 2x your basic 'cup'.

Cups are small, or have handles. Mugs almost always have handles, and are heavier. The heavier the lip the less useful for tea, the more useful for coffee. This design difference comes from the way taste buds are deployed on our tongues. Coffee tastes better from a thick lip, tea from a thinner lip.

Thin pots without handles are not for hot fluids period.

It's not a tea-bowl.

Not a chawan. A lovely word, in Japanese, but doesn't work in English though English speaking potters use chawan a lot to describe bowls for drinking Japanese tea.

The correct Japanese description for the shape is 'tsutsu jawan', but in Japan it's called a 'yunomi jawan', (drinking cup). 'Yunomi' is a perfectly good term, but again, it's not English, and sounds like 'you-know-me'. I'm looking for an English word here!

This pot doesn't have a 'gallery', so therefor it doesn't have a lid.  [A 'gallery' for you non-potters, is the inner lip that supports a lid.]

'Gallery' reminds me of 'balcony',  or in French, 'balcon'. Il ya le monde au balcon! That's French slang for ''She's stacked', or, 'she's got a lot in her balconies.'

No belly, especially not a potbelly. No waist, no shoulder.

It does have a lip, a body and a foot! Yay!

   She had cute lips and a lovely hip
   Oh to get naughty with her nude body!

How useful the word 'body' is! Potters use body to describe a particular mixture of clay.

Let's agree that this remains a nameless, but nevertheless useful design.

I plan to make more. It's ideal for water, cold juice, iced-tea, iced-coffee. But what is it?

A tass? A tallbrut? An umbrot? Perhaps a vessot? Or a tall-ass cup?

Help me please, I need to create a new word!

A Pigeon

I've been crazy about creatures all my life. Love them all, birds, fish, insects, mammals, reptiles. Fascinated by snakes, though they can be scary to pick up. Rays, eels, pirañas, whales, deer, bear. Big cats! My first love was for tigers, after that it was birds.

Hawks, birds of prey - I would like to grow old in the wilderness somewhere, and live with a hawk. I'd hunt with it, 'till one day I'd lose it, stumble around in the snow, and die.

We've lost that direct connection with what we eat, and what eats us.

I love those fast-twitch muscled birds of explosive flight, partridges, pigeons, grouse, the ones that have the speed to escape from hawks. 

If you study families, and children, or have children yourself, one thing you'll notice right away is that our sons and daughters take up whatever it is that we as parents don't finish. They do what we leave undone, through profession, interest, or family. 

I was too interested in art to pursue a scientific love of birds and animals. So my son has taken that up that road.

I'm content with the bird as a symbol, an icon, something that wild and free in all of us though I love following his avian interests.

He's helping me do unfinished work -  I occasionally paint birds on the sides of pots. like this pigeon here:

Wet Clay

It's difficult to believe the colors that happened to descend on this smidgen of clay at the time it was fired.

Who is responsible for the color here? Am I? Is Tony Moore, the owner of the kiln? Or does 'credit' belong to the one who formulated the Shino glaze that I used? What of the centuries of Chinese and Japanese potters who developed the technology of firing to two thousand degrees with wood or rice husks as fuel?

What of the American ceramic engineers who designed refractories that could make an efficient firing of a few hundred cubic feet of work with just a few cords of wood? Let's not forget that we're not ancient potters doing it the ancient way. No pretense here - this is high tech.

Shino glazes are ancient. Essentially powdered feldspar, it's been melted again by the fire, though some other stuff has been tossed in. Pottery folks play with the Shino paradigm endlessly, adding this, adding that. A Shino can turn almost any color.

On it's own, in a reduction firing, with no ash moving through the kiln, this glaze, on this clay (the clay influences the outcome enormously), might have been coffee-colored.

Might have been. But the fire got ahold of it and said, "Hold on there brother, this one's MINE!"

What I'm saying here is "Look what I didn't make!"

Not "Look what I made."

Here's a similar pot, same firing, different part of the kiln. The fire in this case showed no interest at all . . .so I end up with a coffee colored . . . blah!

No blessing from the fire-Goddess. She showed me her backside, and said, "Live with blandness Mr. Potter."

Back to the first bowl - if I can remember making it, (I can't), am I allowed to say I made it? Does anyone remember me making it?

 . . . The process usually works because:.

a) The kiln is well designed and constructed.
b) The fuel is whatever local wood is available. Downed trees, discards from local woodworking shops, flooring companies, all the usual sources.
c) We fire slowly, steadily, and let the fire do its work.
d) Potters 'show up' to put their pots in and contribute human energy.
e) Wood 'shows up' to contribute tree energy.

That's the story of wood-firing. It tells a story. Twenty first century people, twenty first century taste, twenty first century fuel, twenty first century kiln.

Eternal fire.

Same story everywhere.

So 'who' did the work?

I didn't dig the clay, I didn't make the kiln bricks either, but suppose for a moment I had, like the traditional potters of many cultures. Suppose I did throw a lasso around every step of the process, mine the clay myself, mix a usable body, build the kiln, formulate glazes, choose the fuel, and stoke the firing . . . would the pot be more 'mine'?

I'm just one who wants tea-bowls, and likes fire.

The fire just wants to consume fuel and release energy. Fires like wood, paper, iron, anything that will burn.

Trees like sunlight, and want to reach for the sky.

People like a cup of tea, and like to reach for a bowl.

Water likes to dissolve, evaporate. Water moves towards gravity, or low energy. Water will throw itself into fire. This is what happens when a pot is fired, the water deserts the clay.

"Loyal friend you were!"

"Sorry chum, gotta run."

"You're leaving me here to melt. You always do that."

"I'll be back. Live as a vessel for a while, then when you break up, I'll come round again and wash you into the sea."

Each of us has a desire, as well as a device, and a plan, a ploy, for satisfying it. What comes from from all this is something else.

'We all threw confetti that day but yours happened to land on the head of the Buddha! You're so lucky!'

'Or the foot of a slug. Does it matter?'

Let's ask the clay:

"I'm just a lonely bit of clay who got stuck with a firey residue. Some goofball made me into the form of a bowl! Put enough of us into a big enough fire, and you'll see everything!

"You'll see galaxies . .  You'll see your planet Earth, your home, a lonely wad of fired clay that's still cooling, and already has got some mold on it, a slimy mold, you call life."

I have no attachment to these tea-bowls, though each does talk to me in its own way. I'm somewhat embarrassed about their form - the clay still looks wet! I like fired pots to look fired, not like they just got out of the bath.

These still have that callow, wobbly wet-pot look. And the ash that slammed up against the fire side of the first one doesn't even seem to take the chill off.

This pot's still shivering, "Mommy hand me my towel!" A juvenile pot!

A lady named Jane Love bought it from me. I don't know Jane Love though I hope she likes it. Maybe she'll go for one of my free tea-bowls and I'll be able to journey south, to make her a cup of tea.

Lucky Bowl

As people we end up with hair, looks, skin, much of who we are is pre-determined. If we don't like the color of our hair we can cut it off, or dye it. If we don't like the shape of our head there's not much that can be done.

Same with firing pots. We think we exert control over the outcome of our pots, but even that's a vanity. With wood firing you have an idea of how things will turn out, but only an idea. Meet someone, have babies, do you know how your children will turn out?

I just saw a very interesting film, "Intacto", with Max von Sydow, about a man who trades in luck. His associate Federico, amasses luck by stealing it, but has his luck taken away by old Max, who runs a very profitable insurance company and gambling casino. To get even, Federico finds the luckiest man alive, the lone survivor of an airplane crash. He coaches him though a series of games of chance, each more deadly than the last. It leads back to Max and a game of Russian roulette, a game that Max has never lost.

Sounds like an appointment with fire.

So with pots. Luck. You watch the river of luck. Good luck, bad luck. Of course it's all the same stuff to the fire, because the fire never stops. Get too close, you burn. The galaxy's burning, the sun is burning, the earth too will burn. Fire can't be put out. Fire can't be avoided.

So I marvel sometimes on 'good luck'. Is it luck? Or is it just a bit of truth?

Speckled Shino

I can't remember whether I still have this bowl or not. Fired in August '09. Tony's kiln produced some wonderful results. Lots of ash, drips, heaps of color. These grey spots are crystals forming in the Shino glaze as it cooled.

Each firing tells the story of the pots that went in, the kinds of wood burned, the stoking rhythm, weather, everything. There isn't a taxicab in Indonesia or a bird on Greenland's gravel beds whose activity did not influence this firing. It's a phenomena that takes into account all things.

So it becomes a reading, a toss of the I Ching, a ringed Gypsy with her deck of cards. What comes out feels random, but isn't at all.

There's not much to say about the starting point for this thing, except that I made it up with uneven cuts of clay, folded them together, then whacked them with a flat piece of driftwood.

Driftwood makes an ideal tool for working with hand-built pots. The cells of the wood are broken down by all that time in the water. The wood is light, less dense. Being less dense, it doesn't stick to moist clay.

Everything that we do becomes what we are.

A Landscape

Today's teabowl was wood-fired in August 2009 . . . I'm putting it up because it's a landscape. . . .  no other reason.

Remember I'm giving away 36 tea-bowls starting July 4th!

Horse and Rider?

Here's a tea-bowl from a recent firing. It's not part of the upcoming giveaway, though I'm showing it to start my readers looking at my wood-fired work.

Perhaps I'll give this one away if my first 'potlatch' is successful. It's from a later firing than the ones I'm giving away . . . in fact it's from a firing in which I submitted 99 cups, and got 81 out that I can live with.

9 x 9 = 81.

Here's what I like about the brush-work on the side: It looks to me like a man on horseback!

This must mean that motifs from Ancient Rome and Greece are much with me, and I suspect also, in you too. I was intending a landscape with my brush, but the fire said: "Sorry buddy, I see a horse, with his rider wading beside him, as they cross the river Styx! See he's holding his spear, while the fiery current boils around them."

You never get what you intend. Intention focuses attention, so you get something.

In the end fire is the only force inside any of us. Fire is energy, energy is life.

Those Ancient Civilizations lasted many thousands of years. By comparison we're new-borns. That ancient mind's still there, much more of what we are, than we realize.

Pagan Gods, ancient Heroes, and pre-scientific modes of thinking, ratttle about in our brains, while we fool ourselves into thinking we behave logically.

I'm not looking to be logical, or to make sense. I'm not looking to make science.

I don't even keep notes of what glazes I use, or how I mix my clay.

I just make the stuff, and accept a huge loss rate. It's from those defeats that I make changes to my practice. Lots of my work ends up cracked, glazes flaking off, or carbon trapped.

I just accept the losses, try to make changes and move on. That's my yoga. The record keeping gets done by my pagan mind.

36 Cups of Tea Ceremony

Here I explain my ongoing potlatch (Note 1), and the thought process behind giving away 36 wood-fired tea-bowls.

-:-

First, why have I chosen 36 as a number?

The mathematics and numerology of 36 are beautiful. 36 is a perfect square, 6 x 6 = 36. It's also a triangular number, meaning a flat dense triangle of nestled balls may be assembled. Other triangular numbers are 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28.,

36 is also semi-perfect. A semi-perfect number may be expressed as the sum of all it's proper divisors. For instance, 6 is also semi-perfect, because the divisors of 6, or 1, 2, and 3 may be added together to get 6.

Perfect squares in Vedic India, helped with poetic meter and structure of verses. Tantra, a branch of Buddhism, utilizes perfect squares for memorization and meditation.

So I'm giving away pots, but surely not because of mathematics! How do I give this act some structure? How do I make a work, out of the giving of the work? This is the essence of tantra and leads to the heart of metaphor.

As wood-firings go this was a 'good' firing, meaning the fire produced a balance of glazes and colors, a healthy amount of ash deposition, and good reduction of the clay body Thirty-six interesting bowls. Some four or five others became seconds, or will be broken into shards. When you fire with wood you accept a high loss rate. It's expensive. Prices in this country for pottery simply don't support the true costs of making wood-fired pots.

I decided then to use the bowls as a way to give structure to my tantric and numerological researches, and as a structure for memory.

Now I size every firing down to a perfect square. From a another recent firing of 99 Cups I selected the 81 that are best.

9 x 9 = 81. It's easy, to remember. Nine rows of nine.

Once I began to order my work in this way I began noticing a new process of gifting.

Friends and family responded to certain cups and said, "I want that one!" It's hard to deal with that in any other way than giving it away. So, out of the 36, some of these vessels have already been gifted. One is very flawed, and has a damaged foot. But my daughter likes it and uses it. You'll have a chance to see that one too.

Back to the giveaway. The potlach. Why?

No potter charges fairly for their work in this modern day. Not in this country. If I priced my work according to the toil and money that goes into it, no one would buy anything. While there are some potters who make a living, only a very few make a good living. Most are way underpaid.

So if you don't do a thing for money, then you must be doing it for love, and if you do it for love it has to be free.

I certainly didn't want my recipients comparing one bowl with another. I devised a way for someone to chose a bowl online. Interested parties either chose the bowl available that day or not at all. Unchosen bowls were given to those who contacted me later, asking "Are any left". I let them choose a number. The number they chose became the bowl they received.

Each of the bowls has a small couplet or rhyme associated with it, and a name. For instance Tea-bowl for Natsuko, #1 of 36, is entitled 'View of Mt. Fuji', the rhyme is as follows:

     "Fuji's ire for Natsuko drawn, 

       A tea-bowl fire dripped upon."

Later I combined each of the rhymes for each of the 36 bowls into a poem. Here are the first two stanzas, representing couplets for bowls one through four:

    "Fuji's ire for Natsuko drawn, 

     This tea-bowl the fire has dripped upon.

     What's got fire, land, and sea?

     With soul, not ire, it stands for me.

     Watered Shino, tinged and rosy,

     To daughter Maya, a gift with poesy.

     Why so pleasant drinking tea -

     A great life lesson, simplicity."

I thought - I'll use the tea ceremony as a device. I'll deliver each tea-bowl in person. I'll journey, slowly across America, across the world, to finish the project. I'll be led into strange cities, unfamiliar countries. To date I'm approximately half-way through my deliveries. It's expensive crossing the country with a lot of fragile pots. And so the 36 tea-bowls have led me on a journey.

This version of chanoyu is not the same as the Japanese traditional wabi-cha ritual. But it's the same in spirit. The 16th Century tea master Sen no Rikyū said:

        "Chanoyu is nothing but

         Boiling water,

         And making tea [for friends].

         This is the only rule

         You should know."

There's a rather stern portrait of Sen no Rikyū, founder of the Japanese tea ceremony. It's useful to think of Rikyū not as the creator of an arcane ritual, performed by very few Japanese in this modern world, but rather as the father of modern Japanese culture, the creator of the Japanese aesthetic.

That which is Japanese could not have been the same without this man. He uncluttered Japan, rid it of foreign baggage accumulated over the centuries. And he accomplished that by making cups of tea for friends. He is, without a doubt is one of the greatest performance artists. Stories about him are legion.

My tea ceremonies are unceremonious. I ask my friend-recipient to chose a place. I encourage the out of doors, somewhere near where they live. Ideally it's the kind of place they wish they would go more often but don't. I bring tea in a flask. Sometimes I also bring Chaga, which is a drink made from a polypore fungus and is very good for the health, and thus is like tea in character.

At other times I serve the tea indoors.

We pour out the tea or Chaga, and we drink it. We talk. Here's a picture taken of Tashira Lebrun, who received Tea-bowl #27 one cloudy day in March 2013, at the edge of the Canadian Falls, in Niagara NY.

After our tea, I clean the bowl and give it to my co-participant. The new bowl belongs to that person. I dedicate it with a piece of writing about our encounter.

The only reason to make art is to reinforce a framework of real relationships.

The History of Art is the history of social movements, not collections of stuff.

Pottery is useless unless used. This is the reason that most 'art pottery' today is not art, nor can ever be.

The depersonalization caused by the internet may be repaired by using the new mediums in a different way.

The web's primary function is to establish and deepen relationships. 

Exhibitions of art must be recognized as an exhibitions of symbols, a tantric matrix of human relationships. not as the display of objects outside of human context. Selling art to the highest bidder destroys this.

Giving is the essence of creation.

Objects gain life through ritual expression of a relationship.

Notes:

1) The potlatch,a Native-American ceremony of gift giving, is illegal in the United States.

Links to the 36 Teabowls:

  1, 2, 3,  4,  5,  6

  7, 8, 9, 10,11,12

13,14,15,16,17,18

19,20,21,22,23,24

25,26,27,28,29,30

31,32,33,34,35,36

-:-

What shall I do with this more recent firing of 81 bowls?