A Camera of Hours

Another December Day in The Life of an Artist

After last night’s storm, the makeshift fence had fallen

Between our house and the basement where the gang

Of criminals live, so I lifted it again.

I sold a copy of my song “Orphan Trains” to an author for a dollar.

Drank steam-distilled water made fresh through the night.

I planted two black bamboo plants on the border between

Our garden and the junkyard of feces and stolen bicycles

Where the rapist and car thieves and drug dealers live.

They coughed at me and mumbled thug talk as my shovel

Hit stone with the crisp tone of bells. A sweat rose on my skin.

Hugged half a dozen neighbors. Shook hands with a lieutenant

Who told us the jails were full, the heroin cheap, the junkies

Just need two weed-whackers a day to feed their veins.

Was gifted a dozen delicious eggs.

Earned six cents in royalties from Amazon Prime for several songs

that cost at least six thousand to record.

Ate a homemade kale banana chocolate popsicle beside a roaring fire.

Was given a tour of a stuffed animal collection in a room that is

Identical in design to the one in which I type. Our neighbor’s

House is the same as ours.

Drove a truck named “Old Blue” down winding night roads,

windshield and windows fogged like cataracts in the eyes of

an old whale.

Entered a house where a young, Asian metal drummer showed

me a kick drum pedal he no longer needed. I bought it.

Sold four small paintings to an art collector in Georgia, USA.

One of the paintings was of a violin player, who resembled my beloved

Who is singing harmonies in the next room on an old song of mine

called “If I Was Away”

Ate a beautiful split-pea soup made by the singer in the next room.

Showered and wrote something

that was almost a poem.

O, friends, I had

a camera of hours

snapping portraits of words

as I pushed on through this life.

~Wolff Bowden

The Second Flesh

I saw him sideways

since I was driving

A mountain moving down the sidewalk

with a red cap instead of snow

Three, four hundred pounds of person

But there was something else,

Some other weight to him

Something so heavy it seemed to crush

His shoulders into hills, his arms into

The broken pilings that hold

No boats after a storm

And he carried it, I don’t know how

And I didn’t know how much longer

He would be in this world

I wondered if, when he slept

All that weight lifted from him,

The flesh and the second flesh,

The sadness like a camouflage jacket

Thrown in a river when winter’s done,

Leaving him free as vapor,

swirling up

To find the sun.

~Wolff Bowden

Since I sold another poetry book this week (HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE NIGHT) for a total of two books in five days, I thought I'd offer up a poem as thanks. In contrast to paintings and songs, it's a rare thing for folks to hunger for the quiet little worlds in poems.

This poem was written after a Winterlings show at Cape Disappointment State Park.

The Cliffs of Cape Disappointment

Today I stood with a microphone beside the ocean
We heard radioactive foam sizzle on great waves of salt

Low hum of tugboat, high cry of hawk

And there was no verse nor chorus

No hook to hang from the lobe of my ear

No kick drum for my lungs

Just newborn pollen painting

The face of ancient cliffs

Just the fists of old blue ghosts

against the rocks

and I heard it in human years

three minutes in a rocket’s launch

and the microphone heard it forever

while graffiti on the bunker walls

was crumbling into flakes

that once were the names

of the lovesick and the bored

desperate to be remembered for nothing

on a blue planet close to a star

to be remembered for silently scribbling

at the center of a song.

~Wolff Bowden 

Survival of The Artist #2 My Best Friend, The Pen

Survival of The Artist #2

My Best Friend, The Pen

In the fight for creative expression, the smallest most dangerous sidekick you can ever befriend is a pen. If words are coming at you from all directions, knock them down onto a piece of paper with a pen. Guess how the greatest songs and poems have gotten written? Texting on a telephone? Hells No! Guess again…That’s right, kids! A pen!

Studies have shown that your creative potential whilst holding a pen is 76% greater than when holding a spoon. In fact, your ability to create an artistic sketch is so much greater whilst holding a pen that you may as well NOT EVEN TRY to make a sketch without one, for example with a naked finger. In a pinch, you can even use a pen as a drumstick. I have done so, on a hi-hat, and the sound shimmers fine.

Musicians are good big brothers to pens, because we know what it’s like to be taken for granted. We who are struggling to find spiritual awakening in song are often overshadowed by sonic McEarwhiches sold by corporations. Pens know the feeling, overshadowed as they are by computers which do what they do but with “electric ink.”

One secret to survival as an artist is never pay for a pen. Yes, a pen is essential for the writing of a song but in this modern day pens have been devalued almost to the point of songs. I’m not advocating theft; you don’t have to steal a pen…you simply walk up to someone and kindly ask if you might have their pen, actually have it forever and that's quite different from stealing an MP3 on the Internet where you never see the artist face to face.

If somebody walked up to me on the street and said I really love that song you spent two years and $500 creating and I'd like to have a copy of it will you please please please email it to me and (by the way) the reason I can’t buy it outright is I, too, am not making much money lately because I'm pursuing the development of artistic creations to deepen the heart of the world, then I certainly would email that person an MP3! In other words, artist to artist, we should let our music flow, and pen owner to pen needer, let’s do that too!

It is also helpful for psychological reasons to place yourself into the mental state of a pen and realize that society truly needs him because we all use pens every day and, likewise, we all listen to and are inspired by music, paintings and poems.

But back to the ACTUAL PHYSICAL PEN you will need as an artist (and assuming you need the money you’re currently making to pay the water and the power and the internet and the taxes and the auto registration and the gasoline and the potatoes and the kale…) and so can't go to Office Warehouse and splurge on a big bag of pens.

Here is a surefire list of 10 places where you might acquire a pen:

1. Sometimes, in the Wilderness, you will find a pen. We were recently hiking and I found an artist’s dream, albeit a little muddy, nested in some leaves. It was one of those 4 in one pens with 4 colors!!!! And it worked!
   
   
2. At a bank, but you might need to open an account and sit down with a nice representative because the counter pens are often attached to the little silver chains and there are lots of cameras so good luck with that
   
   
3. At a restaurant if you can afford to eat at a restaurant just order something inexpensive then pay for it with your credit card when you sign that credit card receipt there will be a pen and so it might just disappear but leave a fat tip
   
   
4. Walk up to the counter at a fancy hotel and using a British accent ask if you might possibly borrow a pen for a moment and then walk rapidly away with the pen never to return
   
   
5. At a garage sale if you find a pen you can make a lowball offer (3-4 cents) or buy something else for a very small amount and then ask if you can have the pen as a bonus
   
   
6. Your grandparents if they are still alive will most likely give you one of their pens. If they have passed away, pray to them and let them surprise you with a pen that will just appear when you least expect it.
   
   
7. Ask your friend Mike because he is a kind and generous guy and if Mike is busy with the kids, ask Chris!
   
   
8. Hang around a college campus and if you see someone who looks like a student   say, “Hey, man can I borrow a pen?” and then whisper, “forever” under your breath so low that he doesn't hear you. If he hands you a pen, start dancing and shouting, “I got a pen! I got a pen!” Odds are he’ll be so impressed by your moves that he’ll say, “just keep it. You look like you love that pen better than I ever did.”

9. RUN into a walk-in clinic complaining of some ailment and nine times out of nine, they’ll hand you a clipboard with 10 or 12 sheets of paper and a pen…just leave the paper and clipboard and walk out with the pen...TAKE THAT, AFFORDABLE CARE ACT!

10. Go on craigslist FREE LISTINGS and no matter what a person is giving away…another “free fluffy urination machine” or  “couch on which the devil shat” write them a quick email saying hey I don’t really need the cat or couch but by any chance do you have a pen?

11. Make a cardboard sign and stand at a busy traffic intersection. The sign should say, “Will Smile For Pen!” Shouldn’t take long. Only problem with this one is, how are you gonna write on that cardboard to begin with? It’s a complicated world, but you are an artist and you will survive!

And while you are pen hunting, join The Winterlings for a Valentine’s Evening at The Cask in West Seattle. Details here: http://www.winterlings.com/SHOWS.htm

Next on the Survival of The Artist Blog: To Let You Know The Kind of Smoke and Ash I’m Living In

Survival of The Artist Essay #1 Christmas Whiskey

The holidays are an awkward time for working artists because people with jobs sometimes buy us gifts. It makes sense. That’s what jobs are for, right? To sell your time in order to buy freshly manufactured things for people you love. To buy more plastic trucks for junior mint and designer sweaters for uncle Jack who already has a dozen sweaters to help him survive the winter. We understand why they do what they do. The equation is not complex. But reverse the lens and those rich with jobs don’t quite grasp the path of those poor with passion.

So, when one of my overworked brothers asked me how I survive, my thoughts became a fine tornado of advice. Having spent nearly a decade without a day job, brandishing both paintbrush and guitar, I felt prepared to answer him by offering these words…

I have flown with the wings of many an art form. Visual Artist. Jeweler. Sculptor. Poet. But the most challenging by far is my current plight as an emerging musician. We spend years carving songs from the mahogany of thought. We spend thousands of dollars recording, mastering and pressing these songs to disc. We play until our fingertips ache. And, compared to a janitor or convenience store clerk, we are woefully underpaid. Some of us stay afloat with a day job and funnel the money from that job into buying gas and gear. Some of us survive by living strange. By ordering 50 pound sacks of organic oats and eating them every day. By garden and barter. By foraging mushrooms. There are dozens of ways of getting just enough of what we need to keep creating.

I shall illuminate the ways in which artists live abundantly in spite of being paid roughly the same wage as a wishing well. So, as you imagine pennies raining down on us while we sing wishes back into the air, I invite you to join me, and my band, The Winterlings, in a series of essays entitled Survival of The Artist. This is the first.

So when my brother asks how I survive, I say, “One thing is, I don’t drink.”

Now, I don’t need to tell you that getting drunk is expensive, especially if you do it in public. I have a cousin from rural Georgia who has a horse named Pork Chop and when we hit the pubs in Toronto, he blew through his Canadian money lightning fast. When he was down to greenbacks, he asked the bartender, “Do you take American?” and the bartender replied, “I’ll take all you’ve got.” My cousin reached into his wallet, handed him the wad of bills, and on went the night. Luckily, my cousin has a day job which fills his wallet right back up on Friday. I have other dear friends who regularly spend more on drinks in a weekend than my band makes in a month.

When I lived in Scotland I had an amazing hall mate named Dane Stewart of the band SPEAKING IN CAPITALS. Dane writes powerful songs and was playing shows when we were both foreign students at the University of Aberdeen. With abundant public transport and a borrowed guitar, his musician’s expenses were few, yet between sets at clubs, he’d order orange juice. Dane gave up drinking so he would have money to buy records. He told me it was one or the other and the records never sent him puking into the toilet at 3 a.m. He even put out a 45 himself, each copy of which probably set him back the price of a pint.

The Winterlings once played a packed venue in Philadelphia called Fergie’s Pub with a heavy drinking band whose name has vanished from my mind. There were so many people in the pub that we had to hold our instruments in our arms to keep them from being trampled. At the end of the night, we settled up at the bar, and as the bartender handed me money, the lead singer of the other band was handing THE BARTENDER a roll of bills. Not only did the band drink down their pay, they OWED the bar ninety dollars! I asked the singer about this and he said, “I’m a bartender too. We don’t care about the money, we’re just out to have a good time. The guys like to drink when they play.”

Most performers NEED a drink to calm the rabid badger of stage fright, to get that badger a little woozy so his claws don’t cut so deep. So, while abstaining from booze helps a musician buy groceries, it might make the stage a more terrifying place. A folk legend once told me that, when holding his stagefright badger back: “Tequila helps…a little.” But what happens when the medicine becomes the disease and the musician ends up in a ditch with his truck wrapped around an innocent oak? I don’t know. Maybe whiskey helps stagefright but destroys your larger life. Either way, you’re going to pay.

For the price of a few beers, you’d be amazed at what you can buy: A tuner! Pasta AND sauce! Guitar strings! A head of broccoli AND a bag of rice! A pack of picks. Three days of electricity! Tickets to go listen to a fellow musician who needs to buy diapers for her baby! Gas to get to and from the gig!

A gallon of gas is roughly the same price as a cheap beer. Unfortunately, many venues pay musicians with cheap beer when what we really need is gas. I haven’t heard of a single venue with gas cans full and waiting to keep their bands on the road. Sure, gas cans lined up along the wall in the alley might be a fire hazard, but so is life, kids, so is life.

~Wolff Bowden

Next on the Survival of The Artist Blog: My Best Friend, The Pen

The Winterlings Exclusive Interview Invitation to The Triple Door Musicq...

The Falling Firs

Yesterday, we woke up to the sound of trees falling. Massive firs, a hundred feet tall, raining down in chunks as big around as my kick drum and making nearly the same thud when they hit the startled grass. Imagine being an earthworm under that grass!

Our neighbor was having the giants dropped as a gift to his wife. A gift of sun. A Heliodora, which was the name of the woman who lit the fuse on our migration to Seattle. To Heliodora and her friendly family we sold our little house in the sauna of Florida and headed west to this rain garden.

The climber who scaled the tree with his small chainsaw on a long rope leash seemed so competent that I hired him to drop two clumps of hemlocks in the front of our Winterlair. I paused in my own work: a depressing saga of ripping away rotting foundation boards under a mold-rotten deck. Here was a fine excuse for me to ignore the fact that our house was very sick in yet another horrible way, a predicament which would offer me a summer of spiritual work in the practice of acceptance in the face of decay. Yes, I had an excuse to lay down my tools and enjoy the arborist show!

Watching a man whipping a chainsaw back and forth at 30 feet in the air, lopping off the limbs of trees that our neighbor had said were sure to rot at the core and crash down on our house in a bad storm. I fueled his efforts by handing him a bottle of locally brewed root beer and even hauled a few hemlock logs out of the way with his crew of two until he told me not to wear myself out as he was going to pay them with the money I paid him and if I helped out too much the economics of the situation would become absurd.

I have great ambitions of becoming a self-made mushroom farmer, so not only did I have a sudden windfall of hemlock logs, but my generous neighbor also offered me 23 fir logs. Both of these logs are good for farming a mushroom called Chicken of The Woods, which I will grow from spore plugs in spite of the fact that 10% of the population has an allergic reaction to eating them. 90% odds are fine with me.

So I hurled these 23 fir logs over the fence from our neighbor’s house to ours, then proceeded to band practice where our new drummer told us that he played at The Grand Old Opry back when they first began ALLOWING drummers at The Grand Old Opry. And his kick drum sounded just like big chunks of fir hitting the earth. This Sunday, at Seattle’s U District Street Festival, we’ll be playing our first show of the summer. Last year it rained. This year, it will rain the sound of falling logs, accompanied by the gentle howls of an aspiring mushroom farmer. 

~Wolff