Where I will be tonight: Will Koffman's 7th Annual Avanti Show: BLEACH GARDEN

This is where I will be tonight at 6 PM- 9 PM: Avanti Cafe in Costa Mesa at the BLEACH GARDEN Art opening. Hope some of my friends can join us.

Will is giving away signed and numbered limited edition prints of of the line drawing at the bottom of the page to the first 50 who arrive, but the main reason to come will be the fun people with at least 3 generations of art lover and bon vivants, the wonderful creative vegetarian food, and the amazing art. This has been happening annually for 7 years and is always a good time.

Here is the EVITE:

• Hi Everyone, hope you can join me for my show this year at Avanti Cafe! The opening will be on Saturday, January 26 from 6 to 9 pm. Here's all the official info: Open to the public Join us for a Costa Mesa tradition, the 7th annual art opening event with Will Koffman. This exhibition will present a selection of new fine art works rendered with bleach as well as a gallery of small plein air oils. All works will be available for sale.

Avanti Cafe

259 E. 17th St, Costa Mesa, California 92627

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Poster for the Opening

One of the Bleach Art

LACEMOTH

Signed and numbered limited edition print that Will is giving away

See ya!

Leonard Cohen

If I can't get tickets for his concert, then I can at least see his artwork. 

If one is gifted by one of the muses, does it mean that one is blessed by the proximity of the others.  Would Terpsichore and Erato, my votes as Lenny's benefactors, have side benefits as for his work as an illustrator.

Does prowess in one endeavor mean anything in an adjoining field?  Maybe for a few true renaissance men and women, but for most of us, it is the same hard work we applied to the our first splash in the art or the sciences that lets us make similar waves in a new ocean.

At least that's my hopeful plan for my writing career.

By the way, I spent weeks at the same Zen Monastery where LC spent years.  It was life changing for me.

See below:

When Leonard Cohen famously turned his back on the music industry in 1994, he retreated to a Zen monastery more than 6,000 feet above sea level on Mt. Baldy, in the San Gabriel Mountains near Claremont McKenna College. The musician took the name Jikan — meaning “the Silent One” — and devoted himself to an ascetic lifestyle and to the study of Rinzai Zen philosophy.

His five years in seclusion left a gaping lacuna in the musician’s eclectic career. Few people know why Cohen, born to a Jewish family in Montreal, ensconced himself in the monastery’s regimen of meditation and reflection. But “Drawing From the Heart,” a new exhibition of Cohen’s art at Claremont McKenna, throws light on that chapter of his life.

With more than 50 prints of Cohen’s paintings and drawings, the show is a broad survey of his work during the last 40 years. Recurring motifs include the female nude and self-portraits of the artist’s wizened face. But there are also cryptic, slyly comic references to his time on Mt. Baldy.

In one work, “Dear Roshi,” Cohen depicts a nude goddess ...

... alongside a brief letter to his elderly monastery instructor. In the letter, Cohen calls himself “a useless monk” and asks Roshi’s forgiveness for meeting (and presumably falling in love with) a woman.

“Leonard has a wry sense of humor. There’s a clarity and tremendous cutting humor in his work, even amidst the brokenness,” said Bob Faggen, the organizer of the show and a friend of Cohen.

Concurrent with the exhibition is the Southern California premiere of Philip Glass’ song cycle “Book of Longing,” based on Cohen’s 2006 volume of poetry. Glass will perform on keyboard with eight musicians and four singers. (The Feb. 25 through March 1 concerts are at the Garrison Theater, a few blocks from the art show at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum.)

Glass said the idea for the song cycle originated in a long conversation he had at Cohen’s L.A. home. The project was put on hold when Cohen entered the monastery but was revived after the publication of his book. “People don’t read poetry books chronologically, and I wanted to replicate that experience, as if the listener was subjected to random shuffling,” said Glass. The song cycle takes 22 poems and arranges them into thematic chapters dealing with love, Dharma, ballads and Cohen’s biography.

Like his visual art, Cohen’s poems make direct references to his reclusive Zen period. In the song “I Came Down From the Mountain,” he writes about his exodus from the monastery and his moment of self-realization: “I finally understood / I had no gift / for Spiritual Matters.”

Cohen, 74, was recently in Australia on a world tour and didn’t respond to requests for an interview. Apparently, Jikan the Silent One lives on.

The Phantom by Mike Hill

The 92 " H by 148" W x 37" D  two ton steel and granite sculpture by Mike Hill was scheduled to be installed tomorrow. It has been in storage for years as we wandered from home to home.

Before it could be installed, plants were moved, the ground was dug out, leveled and compressed with DG (decomposed granite) and 2 x 4s sunk to ground level to mark off the space.

None of this could be done while I was immunocompromised as the turned up soil would have exposed my then hapless immune system to normally innocuous spores and and bacteria. My warm nutrient rich blood stream would have been a fabulous home for these microbes, entering through my lungs and onto the capillaries. Without the white cells guarding the gates, they would be welcomed into a feeding frenzy at my expense.

But now the time is opportune. My counts are good, but not the weather. Unfortunately, normally sunny SoCal isn't, so we need to wait until the ground is dry, before I get to see this art rising out of my front yard.

This strong piece is a monument to my future.  It boldly thrusts out the message that I plan to be around long term to enjoy its sweep and grace every time I walk in and out my front door.

Its real thrust is that while I must prepare for any twist of fate, I am living big. I am writing. I am teaching. I am planning my return to work. 

Unless my docs tell me otherwise.

Should I need a redo transplant or not, I can't let that stop me. I am not good with pressing the pause button. 

Like Woody Allen's shark, I keep moving forward. Look closely and you'll see a similar hunger in my eyes as in those of that prehistoric predator, but it's truth, not a meal that I am chasing.