Michael Raleigh: Greetings From Ghostland

My Life as Louis Armstrong: 1963 - 1967	No One Knows I'm Not Here	Dance On The Breeze Of An Afternoon Ghost
Wait No More	Waist Deep In Naked Harbor	Geppetto
From The Year of Dancing Indecently	Ghostography #36: In The Belly Of The Ghost	Window Seat For Counting Locusts
What Ever Happened To Chicken Boy Todd?	No One Dances With The Ghost Of The American Girl	Savior in The Woods

This is as true a story as any story believed to be true.

From the years 1963-1967, two people lived life as Louis Armstrong. One was the great Louis Armstrong himself. The other was a skinny white Catholic school boy from the west side of Chicago.

Beginning in 1963, this skinny white boy took every opportunity to mop his damp brow with a handkerchief and assume a raw-throated rockiness to his voice that brought several highly-skilled local ear, nose and throat specialists to their knees in amazement. Several prominent medical journals still reference this boy’s amazing vocal abilities.

The songs “Hello Dolly”, “When The Saints Come Marching In” and “Is Zat You, Santa Claus?” sprang non-stop from the boy, much to the combined delight/dismay of his mother and grandmother. The ladies loved having Louis Armstrong stop by to serenade them in the living room or kitchen on a daily basis, but worried endlessly about the strain on the boy’s vocal chords. "Dolly” may never go away, but neither did the ear, nose and throat medical bills.

And then, in 1967, tragedy stuck a terrible toll.

The boy’s third grade teacher sister Rose Dahlia made the mistake of informing the class that the other nuns called her “Sister Dolly”. The skinny white boy rose from his desk and sang, “Well, Hello Dolly. This is Louis, Dolly.”
Those who have attended Catholic school will understand the ecclesiastical horrors that befell the boy, including the nun’s classic eternal damnation phrase “God knows how to punish little boys like you”.

And indeed God did know his punishments, as tragedy came soon after –as it must come to sinners and great juvenile vocal stylists alike. Right in the middle of a rousing rendition of “Hello Dolly”, the boy’s voice changed. Louis was silenced. Dolly had gone away.

It’s been over forty years since the voice left, and the boy somehow grew up into a skinny middle aged white man who looks a lot like me. Still, there are late nights when I find myself at the window, my face reflected back at me in the darkness. Nights so late and silent that it feels like God must be sleeping. And in my best, past midnight raw-throated rocky voice, I whisper, “Hello Dolly, it’s so nice to have you back where you belong”.

I’m seldom where I’m supposed to be, and rarely where I am at any given moment. I’m here as I write these words. I was here when I painted this piece.

Sometimes at night, I accuse myself of being an absentee landlord of my own life. However, I’m rarely there to respond to my own accusation.

If you read this and I’m in the room, I may or may not be there. As may be the case with those of us who pretend to be where we aren’t, very few people notice when I’m not there. But only I know when I’m really here.

I’ve always felt that the middle of the afternoon is the daytime equivalent of soul’s midnight. It seems that the mid-afternoon of summer is a brief time that stops and stays motionless as distinctly as the middle of the night. 3am, 3pm, the mirrored shadow of the same image.

The concept of the 3am lost soul seems familiar and understandable to me. The 3am lost soul, however, remains elusive and unknowable to me. The shadow in the bright light of day interests me more than the things that go in the night.

There’s a lot of waiting depicted in my work. The figures that inhabit my paintings are often captured in a single moment in time, caught between the shadows of the past and the uncertain footsteps of the future.

It appears to me that they’re waiting for someone or something. Waiting for the return of the past? Waiting to savor that brief moment of the present? Waiting to delay the uncertainty of the future? A little of each, I believe.

Wait No More depicts a moment that has finally come – a moment just beyond the waiting. And what will that moment bring now that the waiting has passed? Well, that would be the story of another moment.

100% of the sale price of this painting will be donated to The Black Rock Food Pantry.
The Gallery at Black Rock and Michael Raleigh are pleased to take this opportunity to give back to our community. Thank you for your support of the Black Rock Food Pantry.

When I was a little boy back in Chicago, I thought that the Statue of Liberty was the statue of a medusa. The spikes of her headpiece seemed like snakes to me. Snakes growing in place of hair.

I’d seen the 1963 fantasy film “The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao” starring Tony Randall as the mysterious Chinese circus master. In addition to the show tents of Apollononius of Tyana, the Great Serpent, the God Pan, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Abominable Snow Monster, the circus had a tent that housed the Medusa.

For the safety of the circus patron, the medusa was viewable only through a mirror as she continually styled her writhing serpent hair. Of course one hardened female disbeliever rushed past the mirror to see the fraud of a medusa up close and personal, face to face and eye to eye. Of course that didn’t end well. She was turned to stone by the laughing medusa.

So I, in my seven year old wisdom, concluded that the Statue of Liberty was in fact a medusa who had been turned to stone either by
1) another medusa
OR
2) Her own reflection in a mirror

And she had somehow been placed in New York harbor as a warning to other medusas to behave themselves as they entered America. I was seven years old. It seemed logical at the time.

As an adult, when I first saw the Statue of Liberty on the ferry boat to Ellis Island, I must admit that I was a bit hesitant to look Lady Liberty directly in the eye as we crossed the harbor. Many of my seven year old crackpot theories had come true in time, and I decided not to take any chances.

While the painting is more directly related to the global perception of America during the Bush years, my Lady Liberty medusa story contains as much truth as any I’m likely to tell you.

I still tend to look at America through the safety of a mirror. If I look too close, I’m afraid I might get turned to stone.

One of my early mixed media works was “A Real Boy” featuring six acrylic paint variations of my first grade school photo. In one way or another, all six of the boys resembled Pinocchio. It was probably inevitable that I’d paint “Geppetto”

While painting “Geppetto”, a moment came when I stepped back from the unfinished canvas and saw the face of my father staring back at me. I said, “So there you are, old man. That’s where you’ve been hiding all these years”. And then, like a good son wanting to become a real boy, I finished the painting. I’m very often surprised by a finished piece, but this is one of the few times I’ve ever been shocked by my work. The other ghosts in my gallery may exist only in my head, but Geppetto is the real ghost in my family.

For a full year of my life, the only music I listened to was Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. At the time, I was trying to expand my musical horizons, and with them, my dating horizons. It was 1984, and every woman I met immediately informed me that she was “really into Duran Duran. Hungry Like The Wolf is so frickin’ hot!”

So I bought a Stravinsky CD. I thought he was the guy who wrote The Nutcracker. I was wrong. The CD opened with The Firebird Suite. I fell asleep. As I lay dreaming on the sofa, the second piece began: Rite of Spring. I awoke from my dream – or did not awake from my dream – for the next year.

The music of Rite of Spring changed my heartbeat. It changed the way my blood pumped in the night. It made me strip down to my Fruit of the Looms and dance across the apartment like a drunken gazelle until the neighbors called the police.

I lived the next year as a true primitive. I danced naked on the subway during my morning commute and participated in nightly ballet rituals with a secret society of kindred spirits who exchanged no words, spoke no recognizable human language, and howled together like wolves and banshees in perpetual full moon midnight.

It was a year of dance, a year of indecency, a year of madness and springtime frenzy without apparent end. I ate fast food with my dirty fingers and drank cheap jug wine from cups carved from human skulls.

I was the great unwashed wordsmith. Each poem I wrote had “wolf” in the title, and was burned in a bonfire immediately upon completion. Poems so profound that I didn’t even dare read them before their destruction.

I answered only when called by my secret tribal name and released Pavlovian howls whenever the telephone rang.

For one full year, I dated no woman who even knew who Duran Duran was. I was the wolf, and I was hungry.

And at the end of that year, I placed Rites of Spring back upon the CD shelf, never to be played again.

It was a memorable year, but completely fictional. In truth, I went to work, rode the subway in a suit from JC Penney, and pretty much dated any woman crazy or desperate enough to go out with me. Single Duran, Double Duran. It made no difference to me.

But in my head, and in my heart, the rhythms of Rite of Spring never stopped pounding for one full year. For that year, inside my body, I never stopped dancing.

Now, I never dance. But some nights. I still hear the occasional wolf howling to me outside my bedroom window. One night, the wolf howled and I howled back with this painting.

If you look closely at this painting, you’ll see the dancers. It’s up to you to hear the music.

From my Ghostography series. This piece is patterned after the mid to late 19^th century spirit photography works highlighted in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition The Perfect Medium: Photography and The Occult. The resulting catalog is my favorite art book.

The French spirit photography of this period was often placed into notebooks or journals that included handwritten notes that described the visual image. These notes were always written in French, and various artifacts of the departed were often glue to the pages.

I don’t speak, read or write French, but decided to include French text on this painting. Here’s the translation:

“The torso of the artist with the alleged stigmata spirit image of his dead and living parents. Ghostography 36: In the belly of the ghost”

The bare torso you see in the center of this painting is mine. I laid across the scanner and scanned myself. It’s like naked pushups – but with a scanner. The image was printed on canvas and attached to the larger canvas. There’s something hidden under that torso canvas, but it’s a secret. And as to whether or not the ghostly image of my parents is on my actual torso or just on my canvas torso…

Painted with eyes closed and ears wide open…

If you scrape away drying paint will the canvas sing like a chorus of seven-year summer trees?

If you carve a sound’s name into the glass will it come to life on your picture window?

Do things that go bump in the night sing in the afternoon?

When I was a seven year old Chicago Catholic boy, I heard secret songs in the summer trees that lined our street. My Grandmother, who believed in Pharaoh and Moses and summer curses on first born boys, always called the unseen cicadas “locusts”.

Forty years later, on a hot Connecticut August afternoon, with the air conditioner humming a metallic soundtrack, I saw the trees swaying in the woods outside my studio window. I closed my eyes, opened my ears, and began to count locusts.

(Here’s the entire text of the story of the mixed media piece. No chickens were harmed in the making of this story.)

There was only one strange boy in our neighborhood.
For 4^th grade show and tell, he brought in his vast collection of sideshow geek memorabilia and a live chicken.
He passed out handwritten “Todd The Odd” business cards to the whole class. I still have that card.
He wore ski pajamas covered with cotton candy feathers stuck on with Elmer’s Glue.

When he brought the live chicken’s head to his lips, girls pressed hands over their mouths and Sister Rose Helene fell to the checkerboard linoleum like a taxidermy penguin. But Todd didn’t bite off the chicken’s head. He simply kissed it on the pecker and took a flamboyant bow.
That’s how he earned his nickname – Chicken Boy Todd.

As you might guess, Chicken Boy Todd dreamed of becoming a sideshow geek. Only one problem… Todd loved animals too much to eat them, let alone bite off their heads. Especially chickens. He proclaimed himself to be one with the chicken. He idolized Foghorn Leghorn, kept a large coop in his backyard, and named his chickens after members of the 1969 Chicago Cubs.

(Insert passage of time here)

I heard of a performer who had a brief career in a 1980’s traveling pseudo-nouveau sideshow performance art troupe. This performer billed himself as “The Vegan Geek”, biting the heads off oddly shaped gourds, turnips, and iceberg lettuces.

Back then, I thought ketchup was a vegetable, so I didn’t attend the show… but I wondered.
Back then, I was peripherally employed in the Regan administration, and had no interest in things smacking of sideshow subversion.

Back then, I still believed that dreams were things that are often just within your reach. Now, I know that they are always just beyond your reach.

Chicken Boy Todd was forever torn between his dream of geekdom and his love of live poultry. He is my constant reminder that it’s our dreams that make us live, and our love that makes our dreams so painful when they slip away.

There’s not enough room within this tiny frame to tell you about my dream. Funny how everyone else’s dream is so much smaller than your own.

I wonder whatever happened to Chicken Boy Todd.
I wonder whatever happened to me.

I’ve never actually been to a dance hall, although I wish that I had been to many. My exposure to dance halls is limited to the urban night scenes of Edward Hopper and films like “From Here To Eternity”, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and countless film noirs that involve lonely bachelors looking to cut the rug with a pretty girl for a dime a dance.

My hometown Chicago was loaded with stories of female ghosts with tragic back stories. One of my favorites was the tale of Resurrection Mary, who was one of your classic hitchhiking ghosts. Mary would hail a lonely male driver for a ride and ask to be taken dancing at a honky-tonk dance hall that had been closed for many, many years. When the driver eventually pulled over to the side of the road, Mary would leave the vehicle and vanish at the gates of Resurrection Cemetery. Apparently Mary is still out on the road, hailing lonely men in hybrids and Smart Cars.

I don’t know if the American girl in this painting is a hitchhiker. But she is waiting for someone to ask her to dance, if only in her memory. I wonder what would happen if someone did ask her to dance. I suppose the answer depends on whether you’re an optimist, a pessimist or a hopeless romantic.

This painting was finished just prior to George Bush’s 2004 re-election. At first, I thought that this painting was about the deer culling that was in progress in the Greenwich backcountry area where my wife and I lived at the time. Then I inserted a paper transfer of Uncle Sam in his trademark hat, and the story became more political. In the era of Bush, it appeared to me as if America was lost in the deep woods of her own making, waiting for someone to come along to save us from ourselves. While I don’t believe in saviors, I still like the idea of believing in a savior.

And, while I have my doubts about heaven, I still believe in ghosts.

June 11 – July 16, 2009

Thousands Of Words About Twelve Pictures

Painted with eyes closed and ears wide open…