Never Mind the Cosmos, Heres the Eleven, Repoducing Light, Color: Primary to Tertiary, and other adventures cooking gumbo with friends

"Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power" - (Paul Gauguin)

The whole week was sharing ideas, some conflicting, others blurring, others contradicting themselves. 

Everyone is trying to make sense of a world in which our leaders seem to have lost their minds, supporting assault weapon ownership, tax cuts for companies, while gutting services and scapegoating the mentally ill.  

Funny how many less people with mental illness kill people when they don't have assault weapons in the UK and Australia?

The blues is everyone.  Some are praying.  Others are dancing and hoping for amazing grace. 

So, I rode around town, interviewing friends, drinking beer, going to union meetings, stopping for a bite at Punjabi, a "[n]o-frills counter-service spot for Indian take-out food, snacks & Bollywood videos" on the Lower East Side.

Saturday, the sun shone through the windows in the house.  The kids played music and i went to get materials for my gumbo fest, stopping at fish tales, Staubitz, on Court Street, picking up okra and crab meat, shrimp and other supplies.

Light was pouring down from the sky.  I rode, up from Brooklyn, over to the West side, parades and people everywhere. 

Stanley Aronowitz was leading us in a discussion of dialectics at the institute for the radical imagination:

In this seminar, Stanley Aronowitz will engage with the problematic of dialectical thought in the Marxist tradition.
Dialectics has maintained a plethora of meanings, many of them in conflict with each other. Kant used the term sparingly and it was Hegel who made dialectics the moving force of all things. Marx, although following in the steps of Hegel, did not comment directly on what dialectics essentially is. It was through Engels, using Hegel that dialectics was to be applied to both nature and society. Lukacs, in the 1920’s, disagreed and considered dialectics to refer exclusively to social relations whereas nature had laws of its own, In the same decade and for the next forty years, the Frankfurt School philosophers were divided on this issue. However Adorno, who avoided a direct confrontation with Marcuse on this issue, thought dialectics applied to both nature and society. Through a close reading of seminal texts on dialectics and dialectical thinking, this course will explore the variegated meaning of dialectics and their relevance for our contemporary situation.

• Lukacs, Gyorgy. “What Is Orthodox Marxism?”
• Lefebvre, Henri. Dialectical Materialism
• Marcuse, Hebert. “A Note on Dialectics” in Reason and Revolution
• Adorno, Theodor. Introduction to Dialectics

For me, the process is also about painting and light. 

Anyone who mixes paint understands that quantity becomes quality, noted a labor activist i once met. 

Finishing the class, i thought about my book on friendships and fighting and rode back to Brooklyn, snapping shots along the way, the colors of the city blurring in the distance.  

My friend Julie had a magnificent collage in a show  on 7th street and others were holding a fundraising party. 

So i stopped by.

Site:Brooklyn Gallery. Color: Primary to Tertiary.

This exhibition will reflect the ambitious, innovative and contemporary in painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography today. Its the kind of show that reminds us why we love art, ideas and colors blurring, mixing, combining and creating something new, from rubble and raw materials, ideas reinvented and renewed. 

Later that night, we cooked gumbo together, the alchemy of flavors, veggies chopped, mixed, the  roux for the gumbo pulling everything together into something delicious for us all to share. 

Sunday, we oped the doors at Judson and welcomed the world, even if there were troubled waters out there. And a few of us thought about what might happen if someone walked in with a gun.  We'd always leave the doors open, with the light taking out darkness, people sharing and shining, colors shining through the stained glass windows of the Sunday in our beloved troubled city.

sharing gumbo and stories with friends.