(P1) Poetical8 Coletti Paintings At Big Bridge
Here's a link to Michael Rothenberg's great international arts forum Big Bridge where Michael has honored me (Ed Coletti) by featuring 8 of my paintings (check them out and be sure that, upon viewing a painting, you then click at the bottom, "Click here to go to next Ed Coletti work").
Shown here is a recent watercolor not at Big Bridge. You may like the title, "Fish With Large Red Mustache, Bird, Worm, and a Tortoise On Roller Skates."
Now here's the link to Ed Coletti's 8 Paintings at Big Bridge
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and also, Check this out!!!
Jim Spitzer On Art and Youth
After you hit the link, then page down to "Jim Spitzer's Philosophy of Art." Here's the LINK
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(P2) Political
Community Land Trusts
San Francisco radical organizer and poet James Tracy is one of the founders of the San Francisco Community Land Trust.
The community land trust movement nationally is most interesting and very promising. James will be reading and speaking about the movement in NYC soon. I urge you to go to the linked (above) website for the full skinny on the trust.
My cousin Bill writes, Community Land Trusts are a great way to attack speculation...the root cause of many of the housing problems in the country. One slogan of the movement is "The land belongs to a vast family of people; some of whom are dead; many of whom are living; and most of whom are yet unborn".
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(P3) Philosophical
Philip Larkin - Church Going
Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
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