Month: October 2023
(Repost) Another Not-so-Subtle Tribute to Spring…or Winter.
Before I get down to this post, I want to thank you all so much for reading my “then vs now” post I wrote on Monday, I’ve had a lot of feedback from it , all of it positive and one was negative, but despite that, it really let me know that you all, my readers, really that the post and the SuperBlog are worthwhile, so I just needed to take some time to say Thank You All So Much for your support, your patronage, and your kind words. It means so much to me..
Besides that, I feel like celebrating, I feel like there’s an extra spring in my step, in more ways than one, I feel like the cold is only a distant memory, that the flowers are due to come in any day and all this because of the fact that Spring is officially here!!
Truth be told, I’m not exactly a fan of winter, I like it fine, but I’m not a fan of the season itself. I know I live in the Northeast, but every winter, I feel the need to brace for the storm. It’s just an impulse I have built into me, like many defense mechanisms, such as fight or flight. I guess that’s primarily why I like the first day of Spring, mostly because I know that pleasant temperatures are on the way. I know that those who deal with seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, will join me in celebrating this joyous day, a link from the Mayo Clinic is here for more information:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/seasonal-affective-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20364651
The symptoms are the that the person affected may be:
Feeling depressed most of the day, nearly every day
Losing interest in activities you once enjoyed
Having low energy
Having problems with sleeping
Experiencing changes in your appetite or weight
Feeling sluggish or agitated
Having difficulty concentrating
Feeling hopeless, worthless or guilty
Having frequent thoughts of death or suicide
In the case of winter, they can also feel like:
Oversleeping
Appetite changes, especially a craving for foods high in carbohydrates
Weight gain
Tiredness or low energy
I must stress that SAD is a real disorder which can be misunderstood as the “winter blues.” If that’s the case for you or not, just know that the feelings you’re experiencing now are, like winter itself, only temporary, look at this as a way to know you’re not alone and that together we can all really…
Shine On!!
A Case of Always Being Anxious
Dear Readers, I have a big question for you all, have you ever felt anxious?
Like anxious after a party where crosstalk is the norm? Where you try to socialize even as you get overwhelmed?
Like anxious to the point where you feel as if nothing you’re doing is right? It gets to the point where you’re always second guessing yourself?
Like anxious about saying or doing the right thing all the time, for fear of losing friends?
Well, for me, the answer is yes, I do.
It took talking to a wonderful friend to make me see that I bottle up my anxiety to the point where I can’t relax.
I’ll be working on some new poems, hopefully to try to help me during this time, but the problem of my anxiety is something that’s been hindering my creativity.
I’m beginning to think that I’m still in recovery after dealing with Autistic burnout last year. This anxiety is something that is totally new to me and I feel as if bottling it up won’t help me anymore.
I need to start to manage anxiety, but how is another matter, as is when I’ll ever recover from my Autistic Burnout.
Only time can tell, I feel, but until then, Dear Readers, I’ll stay safe, I’ll stay strong and I’ll do my best everyday to help others…..,
Shine On!!
The Power of the Prompt: Question 28
In what ways does hard work make you feel fulfilled?
Another great prompt, Dear Readers and I wanted to give an answer fitting for it.
Hard work, simply put, is a very rewarding feeling. I always like to think of myself as an artist first and foremost because I have a habit of seeing things that others might miss or finding creative solutions to problems that other might it think to try.
I always pride myself in putting my best efforts to anything I work on, whether it be at my job, my poems, my blog posts or anything else. I don’t think that something is complete, I’ll let simmer until something comes to me, as it often does.
Another reason why work makes me feel fulfilled is because I want to feel as if I’m contributing to society. If you’re someone with a disability, I’m sure you’ve heard that you’re a burden. That’s the main one that I want to fight against.
Maybe that’s the reason why I can be so stubborn, or resistant to asking for help, because I feel like I can fix things myself.
I always feel embarrassed doing so because I don’t want to burden anyone. Even when I need to ask for help, as recent events have shown.
Even with this, I still feel fulfilled with the hard work I put in, both at work and in other ways in my life.
Until next post, Dear Readers, stay safe, stay strong and, as always…
Shine On!!!
(Repost) RIP Carol Zaloom, A True Artist…
(Writer’s Note: In honor of Carol’s passing today, I felt it only fitting, Dear Readers, to repost this memorial post to the late Carol Zaloom. Suffice it to say, she meant a lot to me as well as she did many other artists.
I only hope that I’m doing my part to honor her.
Stay safe, stay strong, and as always…
Shine On!!!)
Dear Readers, this was a post that I didn’t want to write, but I feel like I need to, if only for the fact that it might resonate with you.
I have the sad duty to report that my dear friend, linocut illustrator, Carol Zaloom, passed away earlier this past weekend. Simply put, she was an artists’ artist and a friend to so many in the local artists community, myself very much included. She was an amazing cook, incredibly funny and lived in an quaint Irish quarryhouse that went back a long time with her partner, “The Poetic GodFather of the Hudson Valley” Mikhail Horowitz.
During the annual Saugerties Artists Studio Tour and her Open Houses, the aforementioned Quarryhouse became a place where I felt the most welcome, where I felt like I was at home. The Quarryhouse reminds me of the bathhouse from Miyasaki’s masterpiece, Spirited Away in its very ambiance and it was simply amazing. It became my go-to place during those times. In fact, Carol was the one whom inspired me to watch the masterpieces of Hayao Miyazaki, something that I’ll always be grateful for.
During a performance of Mik and his partner is comedy, Gilles Malkine at the famous Woodstock School of Art, I sat next to Carol and was introduced to a friend as an adopted son by Carol. She later said that I was an artist, an open mind, appreciative of the arts.
An artist and an adopted son. Those titles are ones that I’ll always cherish. Always. It’s something that I’ll always be proud of.
I know that how I’m feeling isn’t different to other Spectrumites who find those whom welcome them with open arms, as I have. My thoughts and prayers are with Mik and those who loved my friend, Carol.
Thank you, Carol, for being the wonderful person, fabulous artist and adoptive Mom to me and those whom you inspire. Thank you for helping us all….
Shine On!!!
(Repost) A tribute to Carol Zaloom by Nina Shengold
Dear Readers, I wish I could say that I could take credit for the following article, but I can’t. The following article comes from the wonderful Nina Shengold, as a tribute to the late Carol Zaloom. To be fair, I did ask her for her permission to share this with you all since her tribute is a lot better, more articulate that I could be, try as I might.
So, please enjoy this latest tribute to a fabulous friend and, as always….
Shine On!!!
Some people move through this world with a shimmer of magic. Like a flame-haired Johnny Appleseed, artist Carol Zaloom sowed beauty wherever she went.
Carol had a wicked sense of humor and a lusty, irresistible laugh. She drew people to her like a magnet. She loved freely and deeply, finding joy amid barred owls and crows, cats and cave paintings, a basket of freshly picked mushrooms, a gorgeous kimono or a child’s drawing. Her fiercest, mama-bear love went to her children and grandchildren, her old friends and lovers, and the man she always called My Poet, Mikhail Horowitz.
When she died on October 16, 2022 after a long illness, loved ones hailed her in mythological terms: Mother Gaia, wild woman, sorceress, ultimate Earth Mother, mentor, sage, goddess, dynamic soul, bright and joyful flame: magic incarnate.
Carol Jane Smith was born in Decatur, Georgia on August 6, 1947. The first time she was placed on a pony, she gave it a kick and it took off at a gallop. An unbridled redhead and self-proclaimed tomboy, she adored horses, art and popguns, especially “Annie Oakley’s Golden Smoke Rifle,” which she begged her parents to buy. They declined, but decades later her son Django gave her one as a Christmas gift. It hangs over the door of her Saugerties studio.
After graduating from St. Pius X Catholic High School, Carol attended Marymount College in Washington, DC, where she met Chris Zaloom, a Georgetown student and aspiring musician.
“She was the prettiest girl in DC,” Chris recalls. “All my friends said, ‘She’s the one.’” They got married at 19.
Carol found a job at DC’s first head shop, while Chris rehearsed with The Brave Maggots. They spent their wedding gifts on a three-month “Europe on $5 a Day” honeymoon, roaming from the museums of London and Paris to the bazaars of Istanbul. Carol drank everything in.
They moved to New York’s Little Italy in 1967, enjoying the low-rent Bohemian life. Carol and fellow artist Sandi Zinaman, another pre-Raphaelite beauty, modeled for fantasy-and-comics artists Jeff Jones, Michael Kaluta and Dan Green, posing as brides of Dracula or in boar-tooth necklaces and vintage furs.
When Chris’s new band Fear Itself brought them to Woodstock, he and Carol lived in a schoolbus before finding a derelict house tucked into the woods north of Saugerties. Built by an Irish quarryman in 1852, the rambling stone house had no electricity or indoor plumbing, but plenty of black snakes and broken glass.
“I knew it was mine the first time I saw it,” Carol proclaimed with her native exuberance. She spent the next 50 years making it magical.
Carol holding young Django.
When sons Django and Kahlil were born, she bathed them by the glow of oil lamps in water she’d pumped from the well. Little by little, the house acquired modern conveniences and a distinct personality.
The builders had plastered a curving stone wall at the base of the stairs. Carol graced it with an original cave painting of a horse. She silkscreened door panels, hung antique lace dresses in windows, strewn antlers, sleighbells and photographs over the mantel.
The couple split up but remained on good terms. When the boys were teens, Carol joined friends to see poet Mikhail Horowitz perform with jazz musician Joe Giardullo. Already a fan of Mik’s movie reviews for the Daily Freeman, Carol invited him to her annual Easter party. He arrived an hour early — he claims by mistake — and helped her set up.
Carol worked as a photographer and darkroom technician at Woodstock Times, and when Mik was hired as the newspaper’s Cultural Czar they began hanging out together. “We’d take two-hour dinner breaks on deadline nights,” he reports with a grin.
When Mik got pneumonia, Carol took him home and nursed him back to health. Then he borrowed a friend’s car and totaled it. Again, Carol took him in.
“One day she looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t you just move in?’” They shared the house with a rotating bevy of cats since 1989, turning it into an idiosyncratically beautiful shrine to the creative life.
Nobody seems to remember exactly when Carol first picked up a linoleum gouge. “She was always drawing,” says Chris. “But once she found linocuts, that was her thing.”
Cutting linoleum plates is an intuitive process. The artist must carve in reverse — right to left, dark to light. Every cut creates textures that stipple white space. Each application of ink with a brayer yields subtly different results.
Pulling prints in a tiny studio packed with an astonishing density of art supplies, vintage graphics, and cherished objects, Carol hung them to dry in the windows with old wooden clothespins. She often enhanced duotone originals with hand-applied watercolor, so each print was truly unique.
Largely self-taught, she refined her printmaking skills at the Woodstock School of Art, where she lectured on French cave paintings in 1998, created a limited-edition fundraiser Annual Print in 2011, and started teaching in 2014.
Former WSA president Kate McGloughlin writes of Carol’s work, “She made carving a linocut and imbuing its character with spirit was like breathing for her. Each line told a story, every mark had a spark of the divine.”
The women in Carol Zaloom linocuts are never still. They stride, snowshoe, gallop and row; they leap over fences to outrun a bull — or ride one. A devotee of Paleolithic art, Japanese prints and Celtic fairytales, Carol wove many mythologies, mixing and matching at will: Daphne morphs into a laurel tree, a samurai centaur flips open his fan, an armored knight battles a dragon whose lair is a laptop computer, Edgar Allan Poe sports a raven cravat.
But she also brought mythic dimensions to local wildlife: a porcupine pierces the stars with his quills, a pileated woodpecker blesses the woods with a flash of red crest, snowy trees host a parliament of owls.
These images — graphically striking, aswirl with enchanting details — graced countless local posters, theatrical flyers and book jackets for authors such as Sigrid Heath, Janice King, Michael Perkins, Tad Richards, Gail Straub, and Janine Pommy Vega. Carol’s illustrations appeared in Yankee magazine, Sky & Telescope, Chronogram, Woodstock Times and its sister papers (now Hudson Valley One).
Her designs were rendered in granite and steel for New York City’s Carl Schurz Park, alongside Gracie Mansion. Her mythopoetic painted baseballs are in the private collections of Official Historian of Major League Baseball John Thorn and Harry Belafonte.
Everyone who worked with Carol cherished her wealth of creative ideas and generous cross-pollination, along with her fondness for gossip and world-warming laugh. Poet and essayist Will Nixon collaborated with her on ten books. “When I got to sit down with Carol at her big wooden table and see the prints she laid out before me, to marvel at what she’d created, that’s when publishing a book started to feel like fun,” Nixon said. “I always left feeling light on my feet.”
That magisterial table also served as the gathering place for the hundreds of prints Carol sold on the annual Saugerties Artists Studio Tour, which she joined in 2003. In recent years, Mik participated as well, selling leaf-print collages and gleefully altered baseball cards.
“She and Mikhail loved to welcome people to their home studios, putting out a welcoming spread of food and drink. It became a joke that visitors could have lunch at Carol’s,” says tour coordinator Barbara Bravo.
Artist Galen Green, who assisted Carol on multiple tours, recalls the reaction of first-time guests to the quarryman’s house. “They’d come through the door with their heads bent at the low threshold, and then look up and all around and say they felt like they’d walked into another world. Into Narnia or Tolkien’s Shire. Though an Irishman once came in and said, ‘Oh, I’ve been in this house before!’
“There were people who came every year. It was like a pilgrimage. When parents settled in for snacks and what promised to be long conversations, Carol would often lean over conspiratorially to the children and say, ‘So there’s a dollhouse on the third floor ….’ ”
No ordinary doll house. Carol built the two-story fairy house of wood laced with lichen and twinkle lights, oak leaves and butterfly wings. Like her home, it was a cabinet of wonders, a handmade place of enchantment. She brought a touch of alchemy to everything she made, including dinner.
Carol and Mik were legendary hosts. Good conversation, wine, and an endless parade of delectable dishes flowed freely around their long table. I took an informal survey of friends who enjoyed the fruits of Carol’s kitchen, served under a chandelier entwined with crystals and hawk feathers. Here are a few favorite dishes: sweet potato biscuits, apricot chicken, chanterelles, “sinful” scalloped potatoes, pasta puttanesca, shrimp gumbo with pickled okra and cornbread, almond and pear cake.
Actor and writer David Smilow did not miss a beat: “Whatever she made in the biggest pot.”
David recalls the pleasure Carol took in sharing her bounty with others. “She cooked very simply, but with so much heart. Her art was like that, too, rough and at the same time very intricate. She really enjoyed her own work, and the ability to please other people with it. She savored so much.”
Skip Arthur, a dear friend for 55 years, agrees. “Carol’s love, like her way with food and art, just flowed from her,” he said. “There was style, but no real recipe. It just emerged from her intimate understanding of the nature and balance of the things she touched and loved.”
On the night Carol died, the barred owls in my swamp were unusually vocal, fluting from treetops. Just before dawn, I woke from a dream of her floating past my window in a sky full of stars, serene and beautiful, long red hair flowing — a vision straight out of a Marc Chagall painting or a Carol Zaloom linocut. It felt so real that I rolled over to see if she was still there.
I’d like to think that she is, blessing the sky and our lives with her nonpareil shimmer of everyday magic.
The HopeCast Episode 2: The Good and The Bad
The Power of the Prompt: Question 27
Who are your favorite artists?
Dear Readers, this prompt is very easy for me to answer, being an artist myself. I’d feel like a sacrilege if I didn’t answer this one.
My favorite artists from a local point of view has to go to “The Poetic Godfather of the Hudson Valley” Mikhail Horowitz, someone that as a fellow poet, I really admire. As good as I am as a poet, I can only hope to be as wise as he is.
He and his late wife the late Carol Zaloom made me feel welcome when I would visit them during the Saugerties Artists Studio Tour as well as Open Houses. They made an artists life rich and inclusive, they gave me hope that things can get better. I only hope to be as good as they are.
But, I digress. I met Mik several years ago at a man event that my late mentor invited me to. Larry Berk was the one whom opened the door to me to meet many local artists in the area. Every artist I’ve met in my life, Mikhail included, are because of Larry.
Another artist that I admire is another friend that I’ve mentioned on The Autistic SuperBlog before: Michael Ciccone, a sculptor, but he’s also gone into other arts as well. Just looking at his works at the aforementioned Studio Tour as well as on social media helped me get inspired in my Autistic Burnout.
Slowly, but surely, I’m getting back to writing my poetry and I have Mik and Michael to thank for that, as I do Carol, God Rest her Soul. I’ll share more about Carol’s impact on me soon, as early as next week.
There are so many artists that I admire, honestly, but those three are the ones that inspire me to be a better artist. So, I wanted to thank all the artists, all the poets I’ve met over the course of my life, it’s because of you all that make me better.
Until next post, Dear Readers, stay safe, stay strong and, as always…..
Shine On!!
The Power of the Prompt: Question 26
What things give you energy?
Dear Readers, my recent episode of Autistic Burnout has given me a chance to think about this question, so I wanted to answer this as best as I can.
Self care is essential when it comes to giving myself energy, as are doing things that I can control, to the best of my ability, like volunteering. I enjoy volunteering because it makes me feel like I’m contributing to the community, even if it’s a small thing.
Eating helps me out, especially on my days off, French toast and coffee is my breakfast of choice, mostly because I can relax during that time. I always feel that baking relaxes me because it makes me feel that I’m creating something good.
Another thing that gives me energy is a quiet place, or at least avoiding small talk as much as possible. Noise cancelling headphones help me in this regard, thanks to the advice of a wonderful friend of mine. I’ve been listening to different types of music as well as podcasts to help me take my mind off of things.
I hope that this answer to this prompt helps you all, Dear Readers, see that there are things to help you get energy. Until next post, stay safe, stay strong and, as always……
Shine On!!!
Standing in Solidarity
As a Catholic, I’ve been taught by my parents, by my friends to help those in need. I’ve been taught to help those less fortunate and to stand for the vulnerable to the best of my abilities.
The recent actions by Hamas are reprehensible beyond belief and I want to ask for you all, Dear Readers, to pray for and stand with Israel during this difficult time.
Pray for our allies, wherever they are, but also pray for our enemies that they may see the error of their ways. It’s what The Lord would do, so that’s what I choose to do.
Please stay strong, stay safe, stay in prayer and as always,,
Shine On!!
The Autistic SuperBlog 