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pearlbamboo
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Name: Lily
Metro: Chicago
Gender: Female
Expertise: History and Politics of India and Pakistan, Design History, Graphic Arts, Jewelry Design, Classical Music, Violin, Asian Languages (at one time I spoke and read Thai, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and spoke Farsi and Mandarin Chinese without facility in reading), Certain Aspects of Life and Loving
Occupation: Other
Message: message meEmail: email me
Yahoo:  sublimelydogged2004
Member Since:
4/6/2003
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| What She Wrote - Poetry, Faraway Lands, My Life as a US Diplomat and Scholar, Love and Loss, Autobiography |
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-->PoemsAll She Ever Wrote, Count 'Em
You Should Be Kissed, And Often
Improvisations -Concerning MSN Instant Messenger as a Musical Instrument.
To The Muse
To The Muse II
Sweet Weavers
Colors of Heavens
I Disappear
Late Summer Picnic"Dream, he said" II
> The Last Moment Before Sleep
The Banker's Heart
In Memoriam: Mother As Architect.
Denying The Wrecking Ball
Autobiographical - Pearl's Life
To My Young Readers
Bringing Things Home
Depression, Living In One Room
And So I write
Sunday Afternoon
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Visits Pearl
Abuse, the Remainders Table
Lily Designs
Baylor. Wear That Beanie And Smile!!!
Defiance
Lost Love
Degrees of Separation
What Does It Take To Dig You Out Of My Soul?
Girl With Violin
The Victorian Shawl
On Finding Pearl After 40 Years
To You Who Loved My Mouton Coat
My Mouton
Texas Revisited
Sunday Afternoon
Faraway Lands
Delhi - One Of My Other Worlds
Jaan
North Indian Hill School Painting
Don't You Dare Grab My Ass
Pearl Runs Smack Into Embassy Culture
Diplomat and Scholar
Bangkok Tribulations I & II
Spare Time in Bangkok -Isaac Stern's Kindness
The Steps in the Intelligence Analysis Dance
Condi, the State Department and the Vision Thing
On Gender, Islam, Homosexuality and the Taliban
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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| I came to making jewelry after having to abandon the life of a scholar, my first love, because of ill health. For years and years, though I knew my work was good, if for no other reason than the places that carried it, it seemed, sometimes achingly so, a second best, what the runner up does, denied the prize. In 2000, my 40th high school reunion, I spoke for the first time since I was 18 to my high school sweetheart. In the intervening years, as I had become an artist, he had become an extremely astute collector and critic, sometimes leaving me speechless on hearing one of his observations of a painting, a photograph, even a pocketbook made from 50's barkcloth. A little afraid, I boxed up several of my best pieces and dispatched them to him so he could see them, necessary because they are often about motion and light, as well as form and color. A photograph wouldn't do. He wrote the letter that follows in response. I've illustrated it by some of the pieces he was looking at as he wrote... It was a mirror, that letter, and marked the beginning of my acceptance of myself and my gift as something more than a make-do. I am forever grateful.... On Finding Pearl After Forty Years
"As I slip the blade of the cheap but lethal-looking lockback under the tape securing the box, I know the sea of maddeningly sticky popcorn conceals a living part of her. This will be the closest I have come to touching her since we were eighteen and parted, not to meet or hear each others' voices for forty years. I pause, a myriad of color teasing me through the packing, the momentary delay heightening my sense of expectation while Mozart’s piano concerto #21 defines the ethereal space that holds me and what I am about to see.
The first package I open holds a pair of pendulous iridescent earrings, teal and shades of purple, translucent, toying with the light, multifaceted, like her. Then I find a bracelet on single helix wire possessing the variations in texture, the colors and instincts of a Turkish market - a stunningly  understated necklace of dark glass beads forming an overlapping loop, ending in two strands with colored beads interspersed, playfully punctuating any hint of somberness, as smooth under my fingertips as her young skin. I hold a blue glass loop interrupted with tiny, delicate red flowers, complete with stamens, to the light and remember how she loved flowers, finding in them a kind of grace, I see now, that otherwise eluded her in life.
 Digging through peanuts, my hands enclose a necklace of groups of dark irregular disks separated by mother – of – pearl nuggets, powerful but elegant, like her, its strength its regularity, attenuated by tenderness and the unexpected, a portrait of herself, on a black silk string.
Sculptural bracelets of buttons, their size moderated by the wit and variety of their juxtaposition call my eyes.
I sniff each bag, hoping for a whiff of her perfume. Behind my eyes, I see her as she looked long ago. My hands remember her and she is once again with me as I hold these pieces of her, little bits of glass and shell , stone and pearl, in my hands, against my face, a kind of DNA. My eyes, my fingers have flooded my senses with her essence. I had not known she was an artist; now I sit reveling in her art. It is spread around me, covering my desk, filling my spirit. I am touching the edges of the gift through which she transmutes thought, sensation and insight into form and volume. As befits the teenage girl who read Sarte and Camus, she maintains rigorous intellectual control, but it is lightened by humor and that rare ability to know the effect of her creations on the viewer.
I gather in these small, light pieces of her spirit, each a world, and I understand anew what an extraordinary soul she is and know, with overwhelming certainty, at last, why I fell so instantly in love with her in math class forty-three years ago this September."
pearlbamboo
© 2005
copyright e p hodges | | |
| More on the asymmetrical earring front... You can now find an archive of current work, all earrings so far, tho I will be branching out soon to necklaces, at flickr.I love what I am doing now and I think it shows. My young housemate, Tiffany, asked me to make her some earrings for a wedding she attended last week. As she placed them in her ears, she said, "You are beautiful, you know. And it shows in your designs." Humbling to hear. If anything intrigues you, even if it's marked, "sold" let me know - through xanga mail is fine. Meanwhile, here are some new things. Little birds made from sea shells, 50's, of course, with added tail feathers, coral, glass flowers, shells from an Italian necklace, and two little zebra striped vintage glass beads.  Little Czech glass buttons, a kitty and a puppy dog, with lots of tiny glass teardrops and two white glass flowers on silver wire.
Golly, this is fun. love you all, pearlbamboo everything here is copyrighted. keep your karma klean. please don't copy.. | | |
| A Small Poem....Retrieved from a forgotten email written two years ago.... as always, a draft - I refuse the dark side of stars,
The moon
When it's worn out its shine.
Your light holds me
Like a tiny child carries a brand new cat.
Inside me, the match catches,
Holds again,
A fresh light,
Wobbly and soft,
Like the cat
In its circle of arms. pearlbamboo everything's copyrighted here | | |
| Jewelry Archives on Flickr - Sashi Uetake's Painting Website
Bruno Sashi Uetake, my third husband, age of my older son, 43 now, 27 and 2 years out of Tokyo in the US when we married. You may find reflections on our relationship here (a live link, really), here and here,
You'll find his website here (he's still doing those non-homoerotic, narrative or factual male nudes I mention in the third link above...). Scroll down for links to the various painting groups.
The color on the ones from Chicago is truly awful. He's working from old but good slides, not digital photographs, as most of those paintings are off stretchers and rolled up in a huge roll since the late 90's when he moved to NY, Pity.
His use of color, I've always found exquisite. I've a some choice canvases and a number of works on paper in Chinese ink, sumie, and have a few pics. The colors really zing in these so I've posted pics of the only two Chicago paintings with Japanese subjects he did, both of which I have here, both painted within the first two months of when this self-taught artist started to paint. .
When he left Chicago in the late 90's, he stopped painting, saying at one time that he didn't find it satisfying anymore now that I wasn't there as muse and critic,. After several long, long stays in Japan working for a major, major US accounting firm's Japanese accounts he began painting again, both of aspects of Japan not commonly seen by westerners, and of himself, identifying after sort of traveling full circle, as both as citizen of the world and as a Japanese man. How these new paintings echo off the two of the earliest below fascinates me.
An aside - in a show of independence that finally revealed the person I knew he was when we first met, him looking for a place to wash his clothes in the neighborhood, riding around on his bike, stopping me to ask, he was about to make junior partner last year when he told everyone there was no one there who inspired him at the partner level, no one at all. Then he quit and has been painting and traveling about New York City in a fundoshi (the traditional men's wrapped underwear that was the Japanese male's underwear cum swimsuit from 1900 till after WWII and appears frequently in his new paintings....), geta (elevated wooden sandals) and a man's version of a kimono, telling me that it was seldom that he saw Japanese men in traditional dress in NY, though he often saw men from other countries wearing their traditional dress, so he wanted to remedy that.....
There is a striking painting in the NY section of the website of Sashi wearing geta and a rich blue, damn, what do you call it, not kimono, fundoshi invisible except perhaps in an imagined brisk wind, .... I sometimes amuze myself by envisioning him walking about NY thusly garbed, with his hair bleached blonde, something he learned to do from his mother, who did fancy hairdos for neighbors because she enjoyed it....
Sashi just took a twenty-year amble through the Japanese category "salaryman" to get to where he already was when we met, perhaps proving to himself en route that he could succeed there in spades before he allowed himself to go deeply into his true self.
In Young Japanese Couple below left, the girl is a limp dishrag of a girl, the typical Japanese female that I so was not and that he had trouble with, a bit of a feminist way way before his time. In the new paintings she is, if not a partner, at least a fellow participant. He continues to use flowers, imaginary wild and wonderful flowers I always loved, even in his self-portraits, though they are now representations of cherry blossoms representing the transient and fragile nature of beauty and life.
There is nothing to compare to the Mother and Daughter at the Bath House in the new paintings, neither in subject nor concept. Having once followed Matisse's use of mirrors as a compositional and referential element in his paintings from Nice, I find myself quite taken by the use of the mirror in this painting.
This one is done in sumie and acrylics, although the sumie looks faded out here, almost brownish instead of rich black. The idea of ink outlines, applied with the stump of a big brush, his thumb, whatever worked, on the bath painting continues in full force in the contemporary ones done in NY, even though they are now painted in acrylics rather than of sumie.
 
Yes, on Flickr,. http://www.flickr.com/photos/gingerlilydesigns/ 'Nuff said. I've had plenty of space in this blog, lol, already. Coincidentallly, I met Sashi within a few days of starting to design and make jewelry.
My
new grandson, 2 month old Kaj (prounounced "kai" to rhyme with "eye.") Singh
Kirkwood-Datta, and hence his father, my younger son, has a flickr
account. So I decided to keep my archive/gallerylthere for the moment,
at least in part because I hope someday he and his father look at
it.
The son? He left home before I began to design and has
only a nodding acquaintance with that part of me, though, when he
visited some 5 years or so ago, he went through what I had kept from
earlier efforts and unerringly identified the very best work as what he
liked the best. He's now in design school in San Francisco, studying
to be an industrial designer, after several bends and turns in other
directions.
He doesn't talk to me, but I go often to look at the new
baby pictures and puzzle some more about if there is ever a statute of
limitations on a mother's unwitting mistakes, made from ignorance or
out of a terribly damaged place in herself, hurting, yes, but never the
need to hurt, to maim, that my mother visited upon me, more deeply a
natter of regret than he could ever know even if I spoke "I'm sorry"
nonstop for twenty years. Perhaps not....
pearlbamboo
copyright 2008 ep hodges
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| "Knowing" Obama - An Open Letter To The Obama CampaignTo Barak Obama's Campaign - I want to bring together here Harold Fineman's recent critique on Obama and how he can escape the "elitist" pigeonhole http://www.newsweek.com/id/133790 and an observation about how we "know" people, how we learn to "know" someone. Two of Fineman's suggestions in particular, "tell us in concrete terms where you are from," "welcome us to your neighborhood," got me thinking... My therapist used to tell me, "tell me what you are feeling, what you are thinking. If you do not tell me then the only way I can "know" is to imagine. Chances are I will not imagine correctly, so then who you are in my mind will not be "you" as you show yourself to me, but rather "you as I imagine you to be based on how much, or how little, you have told me and how I fill that in with my imagination. You then become a construct of m y imagination, rather than a true person." Take that concept, that what you haven't been told directly by the person in question, you fill in with your imagination, based on your deductions, information available from others, etc, and think for a moment how that might apply to the responses we see to Senator Obama. As Fineman points out, the public knows really very little about Senator Obama, unless it reads widely and well. I asked friends in a Chicago surburb to tell me what they knew for sure about him, outside his views on policy matters, what they knew about him as a human, as a man. Their list? Black, member of radical racist church, possibly Muslim., can't bowl..... That was it. Frighteningly short. Shallow. Very much a product of the blogging/YouTube culture, not information gained from reading more widely. What's missing? For instance - Child of a single mother, at one time on food stamps - putting him squarely in the middle of the generational cohort of kids of single mothers (including my own who got free lunches at school) coming into their own now, recently in the news. ---if I haven't run across this information, I cannot include it in my mental picture of Obama. Community organizer. - SOOOO non-elitist, and when I heard of it, I thought, "Well, now everyone will understand he is not elitist." But that didn't happen. The media didn't pick up on it, neither did the campaign. (This may be one area when the campaign's skew towards youthful staffers has let the campaign down. Brilliant though you are, I think your relative youth has you missing things that someone with a little more gravitas might pick up.) Nowhere do I see this played up. I'm a Berkeley girl of the 60's. I know what a community organizer is. So should everyone else in America by now, because it speaks directly to Obama's willingness to engage in non-eliteist activity. This should have already been made vivid, with pictures from the time, efforts to find some of the families he worked with, etc. ---if I do not know this, I cannot include it in my "knowing" Obama. Sports - I do not care a fig about sports. Many Americans do, including Obama himself, who plays basketball. This is part of the man, Obama. It has appeared in the national media now, but not enough. ---if I do not know this, I cannot include it in my "knowing" Obama. Lawyer in civil rights firm --(I didn't know this until I read Newsweek's cover article today.) "Politics didn't lead me to working folks," he says, "working folks led me to politics." THIS should be the lead-in to a TV spot ---if I do not know this, I cannot include it in my "knowing" Obama. Quoting from this week's Newsweek cover story, "In Pennsylvania exit polling, on the critical question of which candidate is "in touch with people like you," 67 percent said Clinton was, versus 66 percent for Obama—a virtual tie." (http://www.newsweek.com/id/134398/page/3) Obama's civil rights law and community organizer background, if well-known, should raise this 66%, so Make It Known. I am not talking about just giving out information in interviews. That, in today's media/internet culture, is much too fleeting. What my friends in the Chicago burbs know, for sure, is info they almost couldn't avoid (hello, youtube....) Such information as i have listed above about Obama is not sensationalist, so it won't be endlessly repeated, but, clever as you all are, the campagn should be able to find ways - What about a short biographical film? on youtube, on TV in primary states, etc - to get this humanizing information up and out there so that when someone asks, "Who is this Obama?" the universe of widely available information to draw from includes more than "black, member of racist church, maybe Muslim....., that's all I know for sure." l. hodges | | |
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