At the Edge of Actuality and Imagination: Gail Moran Slater's Poetry

 

At the Edge of Actuality and Imagination: Gail Moran Slater’s Poetry

By Carl Blumenthal

 

On the cover of Gail Moran Slater’s new book of poetry, At the Edge (Antrim House, www.antrimhousebooks.com, paperback, $15.00, also available from Amazon) is the oil painting, “Automat,” one of Edward Hopper’s masterpieces depicting the loneliness and alienation of early modern urban life.

 

Against the inky backdrop of night as viewed through the diner’s window are the bright, shiny surfaces of the automated diner and a colorfully dressed white woman, in winter coat and hat, seated at a lone table with a coffee cup in her right hand. Most striking is that while the hand cradling the cup is bare, her other hand is gloved. In other words, the automat is a temporary way station on a solitary and perhaps gloomy walk, from where and to where we can only speculate.

 

Given Hopper painted “Automat” in 1927, at the height of the pre-crash, roaring 20s, the woman’s stylish hat and fur-trimmed coat suggest she is more likely an upper-class “flapper” than a lower-class “street walker.” Hopper often used his wife, artist Josephine Nivison, as a model, and, because he claimed that his work wasn’t consciously about loneliness, it’s possible this character is taking a break from some creative endeavor or contemplating her next move, if she is not experiencing artistic block.

 

That’s why I imagine Gail Moran Slater identifies with the “automaton” in the painting for whom this diner might be a regular haunt. The woman might wish to purchase a ready-made poem from one of the vending machines with a variety of food (for thought), but with her eyes downcast and apparently in deep thought, she may realize that creativity (after all, she is the central subject of a painting) is no easy task.

 

Yet, the automat may be more than just a lonely ship of dreams where one can pass the night but actually a refuge, like poetry is from an otherwise prosaic reality. Although the title of the book is taken from one line, “at the edge of tears,” Moran’s poems suggest the poet is on the verge of numerous revelations or epiphanies that tend to the ineffable. Her goal is to lead readers to the proverbial water’s edge—there are several references to the shore—with such tantalizing imagery that we will plunge deeply into the flotsam and jetsam of our own lives.

 

Moran references other paintings: Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl,” in her poem, “On the Steps of the Met 1997,” Homer’s marine paintings, such as “Blue Boat,” and also “Boys in a Pasture,” in “Winslow Homer Exhibition,” and Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, in “After Viewing the Dutch Masters.”

 

Though these paintings are as different from each other as they are from “Automat,” each poem is representative, in order, of one of the three sections of the book. In keeping with the spatial imagery of “At the Edge,” I would summarize them as 1. Near and dear; 2. Far and away; and 3. Home bound. This structure amounts to a satisfying thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.  

 

“The Edge of Tears” is the last poem in the collection, and, like “They are Present by their Absence,” also from the third section, has this double-edged take on love and loss: “Come with me to the edge of tears/ where candles gutter but stay lit./ My head is bursting with flowers.”

 

At the Edge contains only 25 poems but each one paints a well-crafted picture, dare I say, of events described in the poet’s voice or those dear to her who she quotes or paraphrases. Thus, it’s not surprising that in her epigraph Moran quotes W.B. Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree:” “I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore/…I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” What she promises us, if, like her, we are brave enough to face our possibilities as well as our limitations, is “one true moment of clarity” between the light and darkness of our lives (from “After Viewing the Dutch Masters”).   

 

In a similar vein, “Consolation” is the first poem in section one, about a tree laden with fruit that someone brought back from Hawaii and left on her porch. The kinetic nature of the tree as it blows in a breeze is transformed through vibrant simile and metaphor into the personality of this bearer of good tidings: “The light between the leaves was you,/ restless with intelligence,/ quick    wild/ stirring my heart at the borders (my emphasis) of my splintered world.” Here again is a contrast between love and loss, wholeness and division. Some of the other cutting edges are estrangement, reconciliation, breakup, madness, death, war, peace, laughter, and remembrance.

 

Her simplest and most riveting poem, “Crossing the Distance,” comes at the end of the first section:

 

My sister takes in dogs of all shapes and sizes

        but she does not take in me.

 

I call to her but no sound I make

is made of words that can cross the distance between  us.

 

Last night she was just a cutout on a hill,

a pack of curs at her heels, the sky burning,

and I knew she did not belong to me.

 

Given that Moran has nothing but good feelings for and memories of the rest of her   immediate family, including her ex-husband, the edge she stands on here looms over a gorge of emotion. Even her way with words cannot bridge it. 

 

Another little gem is “This Time of Night,” in the middle of the third section:

 

Under the white coverlet, now as then,

the sweeping tide of the sheets,

the same cool turning, I dive, I tumble

      toward dreams.

Memories run wild. Night must have

released all its prisoners—

my ghosts are younger now.

 

I love this time of night. My bed makes me

alert to everything—the hours,

the planes in flight, the faucet drip.

My senses gleam like candles.

 

How she can be at the edge of sleep and yet, acutely conscious is a paradox like many others in the book. For instance, the rules of her dad and his chums’ card-playing were incomprehensible to her as a child, but she’s sure in retrospect that “The Angel Gabriel/ could have dropped in/ and blown his trumpet;/ the Second Coming/ could have come and gone./ They wouldn’t have heard a thing.” (from “in memory of APM”)

 

I have not referenced poem’s from the book’s second section, the shortest, because, with the exception of her homage to W.B. Yeats, “A Kind of Madness,” based on a sojourn in Ireland, they tug at my heart the least. Many of her farthest trips were for writing workshops. However enlightening, perhaps she preferred to be home at her writing desk, as in “Consolation.”   

 

A former teacher of English who now instructs immigrants in ESL, Gail Moran Slater grew up in Boston and lives in Hingham on the South Shore, “a place mad for poetry.” The three favorite poems she memorized are Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into the Good Night,” “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop, and Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking.”

Read these poems and you’ll understand why Slater loves to live on the cutting edge between actuality and imagination.  

 

(Formerly a community organizer and urban planner, Carl Blumenthal is now a mental health peer counselor and journalist. He used to live in Boston and the North Shore of Massachusetts. Carl writes for Behavioral Health News, City Voices, a peer mental health journal, Friends (Quaker) Journal, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle as well as his own www.brooklynsgotculture.blogspot.com.)   

 

 

 

  

Spoke the Hub’s “Holiday Salon” Showcases New Dance, Music & Performance Art

 

Spoke the Hub’s “Holiday Salon” Showcases New Dance, Music & Performance Art

By Carl Blumenthal

If the Winter Follies has winners and losers (per its People’s Choice awards), the Holiday Salon is full of nothing but stars. That’s Spoke the Hub Dancing speak for performances that in a word are “exuberant.”

Now in her 35^th year as founder and artistic director, Elise Long has imbued nearly two generations of Brooklyn’s finest with her brand of dance theater (or theatrical dance). Others may aspire to be the best of Broadway’s proscenium stages, but here in the borough of “broken land” (per the original Dutch meaning) Spoke is more down to earth. And you must be to repair the hurts of playing second fiddle to Manhattan for 125 years (as of 2023.)

Its venues are studio-like spaces where the audience sits on the same level as the performers, if not in bleachers to better cheer them on. For, as Long made clear in her remarks as emcee at the Holiday Salon on December 9 and 10 at the Gowanus Arts Annex, 298 Butler Street, she prefers to champion artists who are not just good but also good people. Compare that kind of genuine fellow feeling to the tinselly holiday displays along the Great White Way.   

Another word for Spoke is the “spontaneity” that was once again apparent at the Annex in the face of Covid sidelining several of the performers. As a result, Stav German (stavgmusic.com), who was only supposed to perform on the 9^th, pinch hit on the 10^th, setting the tone for the evening with her resonant singing voice and improvisational lyrics, including audience suggestions.

Whether singing skat or beating her upper chest for accompaniment, she seemed to generate her music from her whole body rather than just her head, and one of her three pieces was ably interpreted by dancer Leila Gaudin, whose hand and arm gestures reminded me of those performed by (Asian) Indian folk dancers.  

Interspersed with a video of intertwined hands and bodies and the music of the BROCKBEATS, St. Germain, and Tears for Fears, Emla and Sarazina, that is Emily La Rochelle and Sarazina Joy Stein (IG: @emlalarochelle and @sazzypants19) performed “Boomerang,” which, as the title implies, meant that however hard each tried to assert their individuality, the two looked (with similar hairdo’s and complementary outfits) and acted as if they were “fraternal twins.”

Whether posing like mannequins, stretching, sliding, or twirling in concert, at times using a shawl on the floor as a kind of magic carpet, even at their most frenetic they mirrored each other’s best moves. 

The Freestyle Repertory Theatre (freestylerep.org) offered “Theatresports,” with Mike Durkin as the referee egging on respectively Laura Livingston and Berk Uzman, the Rudolph the Red Nose Team, and Laura Valpey with Andrew Del Vecchio as the Blue Christmas Team.

Based on audience suggestions and participation, they improvised in word and deed  such scenes as “Acting Out in Macy’s Holiday Display Windows,” “Revealing the True-Life Journey of Elise Long and Spoke the Hub,” “A Romp Through Literary Forms,” and “The Candle that was Too Hot to Handle.” What emerged was so wacky and wonderful that, even though Mike interpreted the audience’s applause as giving the upper hand to the Blues over the Reds, no one would have been disappointed by a tie.

***

After intermission, Leila Gaudlin/ NO MAN’S LAND (no-mans-land.com) wrote and choreographed “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Inviting anyone in the audience to be her paramour, “Mike” obliged, with the utterance of his name in myriad intonations and variations on that song, ranging from elation to outrage, thereby producing an orgy of movement. In other words, Gaudlin applied “I love you, Mike” or “I love you” like a whiplash to her lungs and limbs.

Beginning up close and personal to the audience, then dancing her way up to the rear wall of the studio that could barely contain her passion, and then returning to confront the “Mike” in all of us, she demonstrated an amazing ability to wring the last drop of significance out of her heated, if chance romance.

Whereas, the Holiday Salon consisted mainly of solos and duets, Rathi Varma & Friends (rathivarma.com) provided a brief interlude of a quartet, with Ashmita Biswas, Siddarth Putta, Lesly Vargas, and Ratha Varma providing “Purpose of Your Visit” to the electronica music, “Abyss,“ by Cristobal Tapia De Veer. And the purpose of their visit seemed to raise the question of whether there was safety in parts or wholes as the ensemble broke into duets and solos and reassembled itself again and again.

Even given everyone’s virtuosity, 80-year-old Claire Porter (claire@cportables.com) arguably stole the show, though I might be prejudiced at 71. One of her “Portables” series of comic routines is “Sexy Grammer” that trips the light fantastic linguistically. The sheer number of words and sounds she memorized puts the lie to the belief that we older folks might be cognitively compromised.

Posing as a librarian with a penchant for grammatical exhibitionism, Porter’s ability to spice up the Dewey Decimal system with such titles as “50 Shades of Grammar” and “The Joy of Grammar” was just the beginning of puns and other word play that enabled her to almost “take it all off” (her clothes, that is) while “baring the essentials” of narrative composition.     

And If there was a dance number to match Porter’s wordy strip tease, it would have to be Hannah Klinkman’s and Sean Langford’s (slangford.net) “Rebirth,” to the music of Daft Punk. Alternating between partnering and mutual one-upmanship, they proved that while taking two to tango, the result was joyfully intimate choreography. Although there was nothing explicitly erotic about their movements, they were especially well tuned to each other while accomplishing some pretty gymnastic lifts, making them appear seamless and effortless. With Hannah suspended upside down in the air by Sean with her legs spread wide for so long at the end, this might even have been a LaMaze moment.  

Finally, Victor V. (victorvgurbo.com) and Mark Caserta, on electrified acoustic and powder blue Fender guitars, respectively, musically bookended the evening with a selection of holiday songs. Somehow, they combined the “roots revivalist…Americana spirit” of Victor V. Gurbo’s band (according to the Brooklyn Academy of Music) with what Gurbo termed his own “butchering of the classics.” After a couple of standard tunes, they finished with Gurbo’s original about a snowman who comes to life like a ghost from Christmas past. While Caserta was decked out in a garland of lights like a Christmas tree, Gurbo played a harmonica on the chorus and attired like a cowboy, he seemed to be channeling a born-again Bob Dylan.

Such offhand idolatry was in keeping with the spirit of the Holiday Salon for what could be better than the Friends of Spoke the Hub riffing artistically off each other during two and a half hours of merriment.

Carl Blumenthal is a retired arts reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle who has been reviewing Spoke the Hub Dancing for 25 years. Full disclosure: He is a patron of the company.

Serious Fun with Saint Ann's School and Hungry March Band--Live at the Archway!

On Thursday, May 14, between 6 and 8 PM, Live at the Archway, underneath the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge, presented first the Brass Choir and Percussion Ensemble of Saint Ann’s School and then the musicians and dancers of the Hungry March Band.

If duets are for lovers, or enemies who can’t get enough of each other, these two were like opposites who attract. They also played in counterpoint to the intermittent subway trains rumbling across the bridge overhead.

The resulting happy coincidence of music and noise is what makes Live at the Archway, sponsored by the DUMBO Business Improvement District and Superfine restaurant, a unique new venue which represents so well DUMBO’s blend of culture and technology.

In their casual school dress, the students of Saint Ann’s could not have been more unassuming. Yet, they met the challenge of a historically and stylistically varied repertoire.

Directed by Stephen Pickering, the two dozen high schoolers of the Brass Choir turned “Fanfare” from the 1912 ballet, La Peri, by Paul Dukas, into a rhapsody, slowly built Richard Wagner’s lush tones towards a crescendo, for “Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral,” from Lohengrin, and properly embellished one of Giovanni Gabrielli’s Baroque-sounding canzonas.

Even with conductor Sam Lazzara hovering over them like a crane spearing fish, the Percussion Ensemble’s sixth-graders retained their poise with a discipline to match the minimalist “Five,” (duet for snare drums), by John Beck, and “Duet for Snare Drum and Timpani” by Thomas Siwe, both late-20^th-century composers.

The Brass Choir’s performance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Procession of Nobles,” from the opera-ballet Mlada, expressed the ambition of a cinematic overture. By ending with the traditional Shaker song “Simple Gifts” and the third movement “March” of Ralph Vaughn Williams’ Folk Songs from Somerset, the students let down their audience as sweetly as the breeze in the trees.

In contrast, “raucous” best describes the 12-member Hungry March Band (HMB), which traces its origin to the Mermaid Parade of 1997. Their original tunes, based on a melange of Balkan, Reggae, Central African and New Orleans styles, resounded in the Archway as if Tin Pan Alley, with its synthesis of jazz, ragtime, and ballads had been reborn. 

In fact, HMB’s three dancers, dressed as drum majorette, pirate, and jail-breaker, could have been characters from the Three Penny Opera (for beggars), who enticed the Archway’s urchins to step, however wobbly, beyond the reach of their parents.

The moral of the story: Some young people take their fun quite seriously while some grown-ups let the good times roll wherever they lead. Thank goodness you can find both groups mixing it up in the Archway, down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass. 

Superfine Lights up DUMBO Nightlife with New Artistic Spirit(s)

Like a ship in a bottle, where’s the last place you would look for a lighthouse? Why under the Brooklyn Archway of the Manhattan Bridge, at Water Street between Anchorage Place and Adams Street. Superfine, the Mediterranean-style, natural foods restaurant at nearby 126 Front Street, has constructed a beer and wine kiosk there in the form of a 14’ red lighthouse topped with a mermaid weather vane.

Much as Walt Whitman in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” compared intimacy with the commuters of his day to the ebb and flow of the tide, so the good folks of Superfine intend to make evenings in the Archway a rite of passage DUMBO’s residents will welcome once the workday is done. 

From now through October, Wednesday’s through Sunday’s, noon to 10 pm, the Lighthouse will be open for business. And every Thursday, thanks to Superfine, the DUMBO BID and NYC DOT, the cathedral-like, 7,000-square-foot space, paved with Belgian blocks, will reverberate with a multi-media extravaganza. First Thursday’s, from 5 to 8 pm, during the DUMBO BID’s Art Walk, will include a DJ and video art projections.

Superfine’s owners, Tanya Rynd and Cara Lee Sparry, declared, “Now in our 17^th year of business together, we’ve stood the test of time with our creativity and vision, staying true to the food and art movements of New York! To celebrate we’ve not only obtained a permit to serve beer and wine in the Archway for the next two years, but we’re also programming public art, bands, light projections, dance, DJs, and all manner of interactive performance work.”

Although their main audience is after-hours worker-bees, Rynd and Sparry are committed to entertainment for all ages. Thus, for the opening of the season, this First Thursday, May 7, the Midnight Radio Show will present at dusk (7:30 pm) original fairy tales using "exquisitely hand-crafted two-dimensional [shadow] puppets" in between DJ Miko Wanderlust's two sets.

Founded in 2013, the Brooklyn-based Midnight Radio Show creates family-friendly bedtime stories which will transform the Archway into a portal populated by magical creatures. Accompanied by Ezra Lowrey’s vocals and guitar improvisations, Charlottte Lily Gaspard (aka Miss C.), founder of the theater company, will narrate the following stories, with “a few jazz standards and folk songs in between:”

Miss C. stated, “The Farmer and the Sea Captain is a classic love story about a Sea Captain who is washed ashore during a storm. He falls in love with a local Farmer but once the storm passes, how can these two hearts find happiness when one belongs on the waves and the other belongs to the land? A story about true love, identity, definitions of home and where we belong.

The Origin of Puccini follows the adventures of one of our favorite recurring characters. Puccini is a very extraordinary cat, whose passion is the study of dreams. Despite his epic fall from grace, his determination can overcome any obstacle... We hope.

And The Mountain is a playful tale about the balance between noise and quiet, between play time and times of rest. Meet a very grumpy Giant and a very exuberant fairy, enjoy the silly trouble that ensues for these unlikely neighbors.” 

Another Brooklynite, longtime DJ Miko Wanderlust too will fill the Arch with sounds which please the imagination. As he expounded, “Spanning all genres and styles, I will weave a set of colorful vibrations that excites and inspires. I play to the crowd…on rooftops and boats, in fields and night clubs... and under bridges! For this set I will inject some groovy soul in the afternoon sunshine that works its way into b-boy breaks and fun-filled funk as the energy builds [for the Midnight Radio Theater]. Afterwards, there will be smiles all around and a good time to be had by all!”

Crazy Cool Festival Links Healing Arts and Political Action in Fight Against Stigma of Mental Illness

"The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." So said Martin Luther King, Jr., quoting the 19th-century abolitionist Theodore Parker.

On Saturday, October 11, from 10 AM to 4 PM, Community Links, the young adult program of the mental health agency, Baltic Street AEH, sponsored a "Crazy Cool Festival" in Prospect Park, sharing the message with more than a hundred participants that the oppression and stigma faced by people living with mental illness are often worse than the dis-ease itself.

Defying the blues on a gray day

In an act which defied dark clouds and occasional rain, Community Links established a "stigma-free zone" in an encampment of pop-up blue tents, ringing the plaza next to the park's band shell at 9th Street, where mental health consumers, family members, friends, and curious passers-by engaged in healing arts to celebrate their full human potential and expressed their desire for social and political action against trauma of all kinds.

Speaking on behalf of her staff, volunteers, and everyone in attendance, Yasmine Kamel, project director of Community Links, set the tone with the following address:

"The odds are that you or someone you love has struggled with their mental and emotional health. That struggle does not change the fact that they are as full of potential as anyone else and as deserving of inclusion and opportunity as anyone else. Yet, people who identify with these challenges encounter stigma in all walks of life, from stereotypical media portrayals, to open discrimination and exclusion in social and professional spaces. [Today is a day to discuss, learn, and celebrate] the uniqueness, beauty, and power of our community! [Educate yourselves] about the forms of [stigma which] impact people labeled .. or identifying with mental health conditions; and how you can work to fight and end them!"

Mike Veny of Transforming Stigma (www.transformingstigma.com) and Sascha Dubrul of the Icarus Project (www.theicarusproject.net) added words of wisdom based on their experiences of being considered mentally ill. They defied society's perception of risky behaviors by recounting how they stretched their personal boundaries through musical and theatrical performances; thereby finding support from like-minded people.

Sascha "Icarus" Dubrul has landed

Jenna Ritter of DHARA (www.dharanyc.org) stretched muscles with breathing exercises and gentle movement as an introduction to her "Six Weeks to Wellness" course developed at  the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI NYC-Metro), which "lays the framework of yoga healing principles for mental health in an experiential and practical way." 

In an artistic vein, Juan Nolasco, of Healing Arts Initiative (HAI) instructed audiences how to make mandalas, intricate patterns which represent wholeness and symbolize one's journey through life. He presented examples of his own digitally-transformed acrylics on canvas. (Contact him at nolascojuan51@yahoo.com.)

Juan Nolasco's "Neon Medusa"

Elizabeth Paulus was another art exhibitor. Her watercolor prints ranged from portraits to still lives. (Her contact: woolylambart@yahoo.com.)

"Pharmacy" by Elizabeth Paulus

For those who wanted to share their emotional journeys on paper or out loud, the following workshops were opportunities for story-telling:

Kristin Richardson Jordan (KristinRJordan@gmail.com) of Uproar Poetry stimulated would-be poets to list insults and compliments they had faced. She distributed Maya Angelou's famous "Still I Rise" as an object lesson:

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise...

Kassandra Whittaker (kwhittaker@communityaccess.org), of Parachute NYC, a new group of respite centers throughout the city for people experiencing emotional crises, invited passers-by to speak out against stigma by telling their own tales of discrimination.

Through its "I Will Listen" project (www.iwilllisten.org) and the affiliated "Hearing Voices NYC," (www.hearingvoicesnyc.org), NAMI NYC-Metro, in the person of Dana Daugherty (outreach@naminyc.org) gained commitments to support family members in need of mental health services and be more tolerant of easily-misunderstood "symptoms."

NAMI listens and learns

Michael Murphy of Peaceworks/Anti-Violence Project (www.avpusa.org) passed around a transparent plastic ball with suggestive, but incomplete slogans, such as "the most helpful  thing I've done was..." By selecting whichever one caught their attention, participants took turns testifying who they are and what they do. 

Peaceworks promotes alternatives to violence

The booths of Raise the Age NY (www.raisetheage.ny.com), Youth Organizing to Save Our Streets (www.yosos.org), and the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services (www.nyaprs.org) stood as venues of political theater (or "agit-prop"). The first seeks to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18; the second, a project of the Crown Heights Community Mediation Center, weighed in against violence and trauma. The last requested petitioners to condemn the coercive Families and Mental Health Crisis Act proposed by Congressman Murphy (R-PA).

Although the skies did not clear by afternoon's end, nor the heavens rejoice with hosanna's of praise, Community Links had demonstrated folks with behavioral health challenges know how to care for and inspire each other to new heights. Its staff and volunteers proved to be able do-it-yourself'ers in recovery from mental illness and substance use conditions, with two years' experience hosting open houses to inform potential clients of resources throughout three boroughs.   

Community Links's mission is to help "participants improve their quality of life by achieving independence and self-sufficiency, through community participation and integration. [They] work with young adults 18-25 years old residing in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, who are living with psychiatric diagnoses or struggling with substance abuse."

[They] offer:

• Peer support and hands-on assistance in establishing and maintaining connection to community resources;
• Collaboration on setting short-term and long-term goals;
• Referral to essential services, such as advocacy and [treatment];
• Connections to health-related work groups and [advisory committees], as well as meditation, aerobics, and other exercise/healthy living classes;
• [Help finding] educational resources (e.g. computer training, GED classes, college prep, and [other] skills training);
• Group workshops on recovery and socialization;
• [Information about] peer-led and other support groups; and
• Vocational counseling/volunteer opportunities. 

(See Community Links's brochure, "Embrace, Empower, Evolve! Empowerment through Community Integration," by contacting them at (929) 210-9810 or communitylinks@balticstreet.org.)










  

Steve Weisman Bets on a Car Fueled by Faith and Recovery

We meet in a Dunkin Donuts, near Steve Weisman’s “program” at the Jewish Board of Family & Children’s Services (JBFCS) on Coney Island Avenue, just north of Kings Highway, in Brooklyn.

 

With a whorl of white hair on his head, matching trim beard, and wire spectacles perched on his nose, Steve resembles a modern-day “tzaddik” or wise man.

 

He buys me a cup of coffee—I refuse a donut—because generosity is part of his nature. America may run on Dunkin, but we’re here sitting on stools to discuss the often bittersweet subject of “faith and recovery.”   

 

Mel Brooks, Steve Weisman's crony

Steve would never pretend to imitate Mel Brooks’s rendition of the “2000-year-old man.” Nevertheless, he is fond of scriptural-like irony, and paraphrases the lyrics of that major musical deity, Bob Dylan, who accuses the listener “You ain’t lost your faith; you never had any,” on the song “Positively 4^th Street.”

 

Or there’s Steve’s quip, “How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a light bulb? That depends on whether the light bulb wants to change itself.”

 

These two insights bracket Steve Weisman’s life, one of mental illness from an early age, when he “ditched the theory” that all was right in heaven and on earth. He more or less wandered alone in a faithless wilderness for 40 years.

 

However, when his two sisters and brothers-in-law turned to Orthodox Judaism in the early 1990’s, their example rubbed off on him: “I thought about everything I’d been through and decided I needed to be more conversant with my tradition. I began to think about religion, life, God, the universe…how things happen.”

 

Steve was attracted to the meaning of suffering in Judaism, particularly in terms of his own life. He began to understand that suffering can bring you closer to God by identifying with the plights of other people, a notion which reminds him of the book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” by Rabbi Harold Kushner.

 

Then, through “mitsvot” or good deeds, you may alleviate suffering; thereby empowering yourself in the service of God. This thinking may sound circular, even paradoxical, but that’s what faith is all about.

 

If this reasoning also seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy, everyone who has survived bouts of mental illness knows recovery is like an engine that needs a constant supply of gas—an image Steve appreciates because he can tell you the horsepower, not to mention the fuel efficiency, of every car on the market.

 

Like Albert Einstein’s famous maxim, “God does not play dice with the universe,” Steve is equally emphatic: “God is not lax; he’s not oblivious to what goes on; He’s just and merciful. If you rob banks or mug people, there will be a reckoning.”

 

This transformation of his attitudes about things earthly and divine over the last 20 years has alleviated some of the sadness and uncertainty from his earlier days. Steve explains, “It has set the table for what I have to do. I’m a Jew with mental illness, and I have to be the best person I can be. I try to help others on a daily basis. I’ve never been good at planning the future.”

 

Through his work as a peer counselor, his loyalty to friends, and his compassion for the members of his self-help program at JBFCS, he’s on the road not only to recovery but also to “discovery of who I truly am.”

 

Then, Steve lowers his voice, as if to say out loud the following will jinx him: “If I ever relapse to the point where my only resource is the program, my belief in myself and in God will give me the strength to try something else, to put something forward. It’s a nascent belief that hope will grow.”

 

Or as Mel Brooks might say in a Yiddish accent, “Stick to your shtick, boychik, and you’ll go far.”

440 Gallery: Collective Breaks Art-Making Ground in Park Slope

Amy Williams, Gail Flanery, and Ella Yang (l-r) are three of the 14-member art collective, 440 Gallery

Small Storefront Packed with Artists and Their Ambitions

There's no impresario behind the 440 Gallery (440 Sixth Avenue in Park Slope) as Alfred Steiglitz was the driving force at "291" (291 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan) in the early 1900s. That's because a century later the 440 Gallery is a collective of local artists beginning to reach a wider audience.

Yet, like Steiglitz's goal of promoting an American and European modernism that had not yet rejected representation (or realism), the artists of "440"--proficient in drawing, printing, painting, photography, sculpture, and installation--are as accessible as they are adventurous. Their goals are to sell quality work and encourage a public conversation about art and the imagination.

Founders (in 2005) Nancy Lunsford and Shanee Epstein, plus Vicki Behm, Fred Bendheim, Tom Bovo, Ellen Chuse, Gail Flanery, Jay Friedenberg, Laurie Lee-Georgescu, Karen Gibbons, Susan Greenstein, Katharine C. Hopkins, Amy Williams, and Ella Yang achieve these dual objectives mainly through regular rotation (every six weeks) of their work, other cultural events to attract people to the gallery, and, especially, through their Young Artists @440 series. The latter program, run by Vicki Behm, engages children in art-making and appreciation.

"Highline flowers and rooftops" by Susan Greenstein

 

 

Postcard by Phil DeSantis

The current exhibit, mounted in front through October 20, is Paesaggio (Italian for "landscape"), of works by Susan Greenstein and her husband Phil DeSantis, which are respectively whimsical oil pastels and impressionistic watercolors. The painters' subjects are both urban and pastoral; sometimes a mixture of the two. Whatever the focus, the colors are bright and the mood optimistic. 

Susan Greenstein and Phil DeSantis

In back are Gail Flanery's monotypes and prints resolving perception into horizons of color, the ominous strokes of oil stick, paint, and graphite on heavy printmaking paper by Katharine C. Hopkins, who uses them to depict decrepit piers, and Tom Bovo's photographs of leaves, which resemble vivacious botanical specimens. (Bovo's pieces preview his Genius Loci show, October 24-December 1.)
 

Monoprint by Gail Flanery

 

"Pier, No. 1" by Katharine C. Hopkins

Tom Bovo's "Untitled" (l) and "Untitled, Red and Green" (r) 

Young Artists @440 Make Their Marks

This reporter is most intrigued by Young Artists @440 because it brings art down (or up) to kids' levels, depending on how sophisticated they are in their understanding. First, they discuss their reactions to the members' works on display. Then, with those thoughts and feelings for inspiration, the children employ different media to express their visions of what the art means.

By Susan, Young Artist

I imagine the young ones showing off their creations to their parents,  and, as if in a grocery store aisle, urging their moms and pops to buy the art on which their own work is modeled. In fact, the experience for the young artists is not a matter of judging whose opinion is right or which art object is best, like choosing a brand name or examining the ingredients on the box; rather, as Gail Flanery emphasizes, the goal is to "give kids the confidence [to express] what they see in the work. [The program] gives them access." And, it just may be, that parents learn a lot from their babes, who are more open to wandering in the proverbial artistic woods.

 

Collective has Sound Organizational Model

The other side of this coin of engagement with the public is the operation of the collective itself. Members are accepted not just on the strength of their art but also on their willingness to work together as volunteers. Diversity of backgrounds and styles is another goal.

Among the requirements: everyone gallery-sits during each other's shows; everyone contributes according to his or her abilities and the gallery's needs. This means everything from sweeping floors and hanging exhibits to writing press releases and maintaining the website (including a well-written and informative blog). Tasks are rotated periodically to avoid drudgery.

Now at its limit of 14 members, 12 of whom live or work in Brooklyn, 440 is smaller than many artists' collectives in Manhattan and more user-friendly than commercial galleries. 

Ella Yang touts its intimacy: "Each artist gets their own solo exhibit at least once every two years, compared to once every three at the big collectives. You have complete artistic freedom to try anything, to use the gallery space as you wish during your solo show. In other words, you don't have to meet the expectations of a commercial gallery director about what you make and show. Plus there's a built-in support team, so when tasks aren't taken care of, it's hard for the under-performing members to hide." 

"Untitled Grouping" by Tom Bovo

This commitment to art grounded in daily life, neither as an abstract exercise or a commercial enterprise alone, makes the democratic give and take of a collective worthwhile. The involvement of the artists in the operation of the gallery also builds relationships with the surrounding community.

Amy Williams enthuses "the public has more access to artists here. They can bounce ideas off us because we're sitting in the gallery during receptions and regular hours. We're a community of trust; we put forth each other's work equally."   

By building this solid organizational foundation, the gallery has enhanced its local reputation via two yearly exhibits involving calls for national entries, and using outside judges-curators. One displays up to 70 reasonably-priced, small works immediately after 440's winter holiday weekend sale, with items ranging from $4.40 to $440! The other is a theme show. For Earth this past summer, 13 objets d'art were selected from 600 submissions.

To skeptics who believe collectives represent a bygone era (which some baby boomers would rather forget), the 440 Gallery demonstrates efficiency with a human face. Each member has his or her drawer of samples in a flat file well arranged for browsing and sale. But this is more than coffee-table stuff. Here you see the pieces of the puzzle that make up the working lives of 14 women and men  who, luckily for the rest of us, are fine artists.

The 440 Gallery, 440 6th Avenue, Brooklyn 11215, is open Thursdays and Fridays, 4-7 pm; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 am-7 pm. The closing reception for Paesaggio is Sunday, October 20, 4:40  pm. For more information, call 718-499-3844 or go to www.440gallery.com.