MEI SAVAGE BRADY

          BY ACCIDENT more than 3 years after I had written this post and had not publish it, I have now published it. It lingered in the written but not published. Awaiting a day when I opened THE ADVENTUROUS HEART by Ernst Junger where I had put a printed out version of this post.  Today I had taken down Junger's book as I had been reading in Blanchot's THE BOOK TO COME since in a new novel by Patrick Modiano he quotes a passage from Blanchot on Diary and Story where Junger's book was mentioned.

        To be arrogant: I learned about art by looking at it in galleries, in museums, in books, on walls of friends' houses, from gossip, from who knows where: just like Baudelaire I will claim.  

        I have never sat in art history classes which are nothing more than slide shows with an exam at the end testing your ability to ID pictures, worse than a police line up you could say.

       ... and so I have come to writing about John Wesley, Andy Warhol, Pati Hill Martin Rameriz, Michael Madore, Howard Finster, Jeff Adams... 

       So, I have come to the art of Mei Savage Brady: 

                                                                           (a detail)
photographed badly, framed badly yet given the ability now to present a picture captured by a cellphone I am willing to state these two pictures are Mei Savage Brady's claim to not be forgotten...

NOT TO BE FORGOTTEN

but most likely to be as she did not really scratch the earth beyond my rescuing these pictures, beyond the memory of an aging daughter and in turn two grand children who... but in the available sources all the soil fully necessary to fill in her grave out there again and again on Long Island but before I get to the burial---these paintings, water colour... as if bandages across a still leaking wound... she was almost guilt ridden sending them to be as they did not look at all like her other work: realistic, commercial, well- executed, entered into "juried shows", these abstractions of  a life that she did not lead, comfortable because of a successful husband (over-head garage doors, of all things, a nice guy..and she had unlimited money for materials, a grand studio, collection of books...and yet these pictures, send off to me, rolled up and never to be in handsome frames... how afflicted she was by classic allusions and then these bindings across the wound of her life--- that began as her family worked in a duck farm on Long Island and the language of Belorussia, not even Russian, but the overlooked center of both the whole of World War II and the Holocaust for good measure... but finally  these two pictures with the signature of the artist as a sort of talesman: this student of Philip Evergood, who at one time lived in Patchogue before burning to death in Connecticut--what  a fate for a teacher... but Mei was the only person I ever knew in Patchogue to describe herself as an artist but very quietly and she the mother of the girl who would have the mis-fortune to be my muse, Melinda, to be found looking into a locker on the second Floor of Patchogue High School in 1961-62--- so now you have the whole story, again... these corpse wrappings disguised as paintings...


The shovelfuls:           one

Mei Savage BradyNoted North Fork artist and sculptor Mei Savage Brady diedFriday,  Oct. 8, at her home in Mattituck. She was 78 years old.  Ms. Brady's works were exhibited widely on Long Island and in New York City over the past 50 years. She was honored for her work by the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, the Hecksher Museum in Huntington, Guild Hall in East Hampton, the East End Arts Council in Riverhead and the Smithtown Arts Council. Several of her pieces are in the permanent collection of the Islip Art Museum.  Muts. Brady was born Jan. 1, 1921, to Anthony and Mary (Choprowski) Savage in the hamlet of Brookhaven on one of Long Island's first duck farms. She graduated from Bellport High School in 1938 and studied painting and drawing in New York City in the early 1940s. In the 1950s, artist Philip Evergood of East Patchogue became her mentor. She painted throughout her adult life, and her most recent work currently is on exhibit at the Clayton & Libertore Gallery in Bridgehampton.  A spokesperson at the gallery described the Brady exhibit as a "new phase" of "semi-abstract" black and white paintings that had been completed since March of this year.  Ms. Brady also was an active environmentalist. She was instrumental in the founding of the North Fork Preservation Society in the late 1960s and, later, the creation of the North Fork Environmental Council.  A statement released by family members said: "All who knew and loved Mei Savage Brady will miss her endless energy, talent and generosity of spirit and mind."
Surviving are Ms. Brady's husband, Warren; her daughter, Melinda Munford Jaques of Water Mill; two sisters, Veronica Bergin of Westhampton and Helen Adams of Center Moriches; her brother, Benjamin Savage of Brookhaven; two granddaughters; and a stepgrandson. She was preceded in death by a brother, Frank Savage of Center Moriches.
A funeral mass was celebrated Monday morning at Our Lady of Good Counsel R.C. Church in Mattituck with Father Peter Allen officiating. Burial followed at Cutchogue Cemetery. Arrangements were made by the F.J. McLaughlin Funeral Home of Riverhead.


                                twoMei Brady painted and sculpted for sixty years. Her work is in permanent collection of Islip Art Museum, Long Island. She exhibited her work at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton; Hecksher Art Museum, Huntington;  and Guild Hall, East Hampton.   She received an award in a juried show by Henry Geldzahler, former Curator, American Art at Metropoitan Museum of Art in NYC.   Submitted by Melinda Jacques, who houses the collection of her mother.

                                three
Goddess of the Sound.  This is the weekend that Teima, goddess of Long Island Sound, will take to the seas. For the last five months Teima has been waiting to get her feet wet in the Mattituck studio of Mei Savage Brady, an artist. Ms. Brady created Teima, a figurehead, from a six-foot-long piece of bass wood  It was her husband, Warren's, idea that a figurehead was what his 43-foot Island Trader ketch Arabesque needed. "It's part of the lure of the sea," Mr. Brady said. So are mermaids, and figurehead carvers, it turned out, are just as elusive.

"My husband looked for three years," Ms. Brady said. "He couldn't find anyone to make the figurehead. So finally I decided to do it."  Ms. Brady has painted, sculptured and carved, so making a figurehead combined her talents, she said. And because she displayed her work in East End galleries, why not also on East End waterways? Five extra coats of varnish were the only concession she made to Teima's marine backdrop.  Teima, goddess of Long Island Sound -- "the name just came to me," Ms. Brady said -- appears as a young blond woman in a multicolored short skirt. "Most figureheads are just the bust of a woman," Ms. Brady said. She decided to give her husband the whole body. But with a bit of excitement.  The finished figurehead is bare-breasted. "I didn't intend it to be nude," Ms. Brady said. "I was working on the anatomy and I got so involved with it I thought it would be a shame to destroy it by covering it up."  Mr. Brady said that was just fine with him.

                               four

Art; SURPRISES AT PARRISH SHOW By HELEN A. HARRISON  Published: December 13, 1981...  to the consternation of some artists, no firstplace award was made. The juror, Dore Ashton, a well-known writer on modern art who is a professor of art history at Cooper Union, instead picked seven artists for special mention, and the museum has opted for a group exhibition of their work next fall.
Mei Savage Brady's ''Shut the Mountain Door'' is also powerful, but makes its impact with ambiguity, appearing to alternate between two and three dimensions and even seeming to radiate an inner light from beneath its Lucite surface.

                          REBUTTAL  

Fully accepting the verdict of disappearance while this person possessed of his eyes and his typing these sentences the ability to urge other eyes, other words remains for a moment, but for not that long as soon enough, soon enough

 

THE BULGARIAN PSYCHIATRIST (pages)

 

For many years I have been writing a book about four men I contained in a book NOTHING DOING.  These are some pages...

George has been drinking again and I have been listening to him in The Grass Roots.    One of those nights when no one we knew came it.  

It had been a long day with my patients.  I am old fashioned. They become part of my life even though I have them out there as I am supposed to.  But how to remain human, isn't that all anyone can ask for…

       Once one of them, even back in Bulgaria, you know who I mean, became human for a moment and said to me, very quickly as we walked near Sveta Nedelya : just leave, or maybe it would be better to catch it exactly: just go away, he said

This man didn't have to say anything more.  It was all he was capable of.  I had helped him with his son who was very sick.  I won't tell you who he was.  It doesn’t matter but I knew that he was speaking for them.  I had had helped some of them when they had no one else to turn to:  for some reason they understood that nothing else worked.

George is talking about Bulgaria, a Bulgaria that no longer exists and even then it did not exist or at least people did not see it or even know it might exist. 

I am still sometimes in Bulgaria.  You can not take a language out of the brain.  A new language does not replace the old language. Bulgaria under the communism:  people look at me when I say that:  none of that exists except in books.

But in my head, I want to say and I know they are holding back from saying: poor man. 

45

I should tell you--- like I told George--- about going into The Guardian office in London having come back from Sofia and trying to talk about the Freedom Village that was set up in front of the Communist Party building in the summer of 1990.  I did not know how to make it vivid to these English people.  They had a man in Bulgaria.  They did not want another voice.  One voice was enough and he had his two or three inches somewhere in the paper.  No one that summer, that hottest summer on record in England, wanted to know about a Freedom Village in Bulgaria. It sounded like an American resort filled with people waving Bibles and shotguns, Clare told me and everybody in England knew enough about Bulgaria.  I had known Clare for twenty years.  That didn’t help.  At all.  She thought I was making it up and I wasn't trained to look at things like their man in Bulgaria.

And George embarrassed me by saying, you understand this Bulgaria, all these Bulgarias, without speaking the language.  You are as powerless as all this implies and is understood.  No one in the West will care what you have to say.  No one in Bulgaria will understand what you are saying.

45

If they find you still in Bulgaria, this man was telling me, you would be sent to the psychotic ward, George was saying.  That is how I was to understand this man's words: just go away.    I understood what they meant:  just go away.  They didn’t need to say anything more.  If I did not understand what they were saying they had a place for me in one of their hospitals…

45

To try to understand driving across the Air Force range--- I should have looked carefully at the map, the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range--- with a road like a wire bisecting it on the way to Barstow---  this time--- and  George nudging aside the man in Ajo who I see walking into a diner in a small strip mall just outside… 

though George is going to talk about violent death also: torture, beatings, and how a man put on a dead man's clothes as if he always belonged in that clothing:  without the slightest twinge of guilt: something that is not in his or their vocabulary… but this man in Ajo… where has he gotten to?  

Can I pretend I knocked on the door where he was staying or can I write, his car was not there in the morning?  Probably on his way up to Phoenix and then to get the lead out as he had to be in Chloride before it got dark.  His wife was waiting for him and the child was going to need a lot of love, and he would curl his lip as if anyone knew what the phrase:  she will need a lot of love.

45

Forget the local colour, George is saying.  You are not some guy stuck in a pig hole in the countryside.  I want you to move me about in your mind.  I want not to be fixed like some dead bug tacked to an exhibit wall.  I was happy, every day I was happy to see the new buildings going up in New York--- do you remember where we lived in Brooklyn?  None of it is there anymore.   The landlord moved to Florida.  The building was torn down and no one knows what it looked like.  That is not something to mourn, at all.  A person can always go to Paris to see things that stay the way they were.  Every city is different.  People get confused when they try to criticize a city with the standards of another city.  It is a way to go crazy.  You have to see what is in front of your face, first.    You go crazy if you can not look and see what is really there…   never forget that.

45

So throw in the picture from that cemetery.  A moment before the plastic flowers get blown apart to become burial rubbish against the barbed wire fence.  Make sure you mention the birthday candles arranged in the earth but not lit.  To be lit by lightning, you can suppose…memorial rubbish for someone going to a shop, buying, carrying, leaving behind, blown away… idle sentimentality, poor man.

 You told me once of walking around in Dublin and wanting to almost cry because it was all so painful… to have admitted that is sufficient.  No one walks around in New York talking:  do you remember when… the city is a wonderful drug wiping itself clear and wipes away those thoughts from the people who find themselves living here.  And it’s something to be proud of, not scorned like some pretend.  When I go Upstate Katya's sister has a photo book of OLDE NEW YORK.  She bought it because she thought she would impress me with her new found interest in history.  I wanted to tell her what Ed said in the Grass Roots:  Francis Bacon liked old photographs of masses of people because all the people in the photographs were dead, now, and I am alive looking at them. 

45

While George did not know the novels of Gerhard Roth--- it is a permanent regret  we were not able to talk about them--- George did tell me he had read two books by Max Frisch:  Man in the Holocene and I'm not Stiller.   

He did not want to forget his German.  While no longer having a desire to go to Germany the language allowed him to think, he said.  Only if you know German could you know what I am trying to say.  It is not that German is better than English but English is the language of the streets, of this bar, of the television, the language my patients speak to me, the language my children use and which I talk to them in.  German is my other language.  The language took me out of Bulgaria even during the Communism.  I have told you all of that and even in East Germany the language, though damaged by the communism, could not have been hurt at its center which even resisted the Nazis contrary to what some would have you believe.  People do not lose everything and yet rebuilt everything if there is nothing at the center.  That is a mystery, George would say.  I wonder if everything was wiped out in the United States if it could all be re-built.  To think of the United States broken into pieces and then divided into two competing systems and then re-united!  Americans do not know what it is means to lose.  Bulgarians only know about loss and it is nothing to be proud of, nothing is gained from the experience.  Germany is different, in some way, and it drives some people crazy but they can't do anything about it.

IN SOFIA, BULGARIA SUMMER 1990

 30 years ago I was living in Summertown, Oxford, England with Ruth and our daughter Elizabeth who was two and half.  Ruth's mother came for a visit and I went to Sofia for a week.

BEFORE.  

A PREFACE: 

                              reality always tempers 

I had been in Bulgaria six years before when the fortieth anniversary of 9 September 1944 was being prepared to be celebrated.  Of course I knew that things had changed in the previous year and I wanted to see what was going on.






In the weeks before going to Sofia I had been reading in the near medieval quiet of the Duke Humfrey's library of the Bodleian, the little pocket journals of James Thomson BV as I was wanting to imagine  his life--- the life of the man who had written "The City of Dreadful Night" the single greatest poem to come out of Victorian England--- I noted in a journal:  Dr. Karl Marx and his address as both men sat in the same room in the British Library... it is known that Marx approved of Thomson's translations of Heine... but  that is all... James Thomson has been on my mind now for more than 50 years... i have a long book about him FORGET THE FUTURE: a section was published in BOMB https://bombmagazine.org/articles/an-ending/ 








I went by way of Zurich and arrived at Sofia airport which was dark inside even though it was the afternoon... no real passport control...a brief glance at the passport and waved on through...so unlike previous times... and many people yelling taxi taxi taxi... the first change from 1984, and the last time I will mention that word, change.






I was met by Philip Dimitrov and his wife Ellie.  In 1984 I had brought the collected works of Freud to Philip as a gift from his friend George Kamen, who was then living in exile in New York.  Back in 1984 Philip was a young lawyer and doing group therapy inspired by the work of George who had introduced the idea to Bulgaria and then was forced to flee Bulgaria... it was said he had treated the child of someone on the central committee who was seriously mentally unwell: talk therapy was taboo and George was told it would be wise if he ... as if  such a treatment became known to other members of ....  there were always these pauses...but this report is not about George but about this moment in Sofia in July... I stayed in the apartment of Philip's parents in one of the housing complexes not distant from the centre:

People took pride in the interiors of their apartments, it was said, 

but all the public spaces about the buildings were haphazardly cared for, as they were public property and rarely would foreign people venture into such housing complexes...people freely getting together to improve a public space was unheard of and in fact it was inconceivable.

The week went away very quickly.  Between the archeology museum and the great imposing building of the Communist Party. 





was a broad avenue and an open space--- on the other side of the mausoleum and the national bank building, was a space filled with tents and each tent seemed to represent a particular political party, religious group or interest group or...

                                           

TALK                   TALK                               TALK                                                             TALK



The strangest aspect was the appearance of buttons  with photographs of Simeon on them--- the now grown-up former Tsar who had been exiled by the communists after 1944.  He had been educated in America and lived in Spain. I  saw people wearing buttons with his image and the image of his father, Boris.

STUFF 

                 STUFF 

                                STUFF 

                                          MADE VISIBLE

Memory is too often just a bag of stuff...people were playing guitars, looking at screens of one sort or another: conversation and people moved from one tent area to the next... people knew Philip and he was constantly being approached; constant brief conversations... all of this was in no way how it had been even 6 years before...  




Behind our back if we are looking at the encampment is what was the mausoleum:



but of course before the recent events other sorts of gatherings... at one time school children were brought to the mausoleum to view the embalmed  body of Georgi Dimitrov and I too had been there a number of times...wonderful air-conditioning and if you lingered you would feel the finger of a guard in the center of your back to move you along... of course I had seen other bodies on display in funeral parolors, including my own parents...
                                                                               

Before, no one went willingly to see the corpse of Dimitrov... one paraded by on official occasions with one's group--though it was NOT REQUIRED but expected..... and if you wanted something or needed a signature an absence might be noted or not noted...

Another day a tent had been set up and it is being watched by a man in uniform.

And heaps of stuff... and conversation....  normally---well, when I was here in 1984 and so long ago as 1967 and later in the 70s. no one lingered... one walked quickly in this area...

TALK

Here I should insert a photograph from the once upon a time when the leadership of The Peaople's Republic of Bulgaria stood on this perch waving to the crowds marching by

A Bulgarian of a certain age could recite the string of adjectives and nouns that would be pressed into service to describe the person whose hand wrote these letters.  And a person familiar with the movies of Eisenstein might appreciate the lettering on this shop front

Here I need only one word

(Bread)

 the end or an end

an end

or the way it was

 to be more---- 2020--- just heaps of photos... time...1984... 1993...

one wonders what this guy is doing 36 years later...

Across the way from the talking talking talking was another sort of talking: the club of the Bulgarian Socialist party formrly the Bulgarian Communist Party

and of course people strolling by, by by, by...

I WAS GOING TO END THERE BUT OF COURSE THAT WOULD BE CHEATING, 

only Petkov's grave remains...

-  

6- So to see for myself what was going on.  I won't rehearse the political/historical narrative.  It was a busy week with an over-night trip to Veliko Tarnovo and Targovishte. 

7- what remains: a tent city by the archeology museum across from the former communist party headquarters, people playing guitars..while the communists blasted heavy metal music from their club in the former headquarters... 

8- I made lists.  Everything seemed to be uncertain. Of course I could not follow much of it....talking always to mayself and the sheer shock at being in a place in whuich everythig that seemed to be eternal when I first was in Sofia in 1967 was while still there was in a sense not there though hysically still present. 

JACK WESLEY AND FRANZ KLINE from WESLEY by Thomas McGonigle

       From my Wesley book:

Jack Wesley and Franz Kline

                 (another visit)

And we are talking about age and I am telling him I feel old at being 70 on the way to 71 and he is saying I don’t know how old I am and I am saying you are on the way to 87 and as I am saying this I tell him because you don’t want to be 86 and he says in the post office that was what they marked on a parcel that is to be destroyed and in the bar it means you got thrown out and in Ireland I am saying they use the phrase:  you’re barred and I knew a man who was barred for being boring and Jack says that must have been awful to be called boring and not to be allowed into a bar, it isn’t so bad if you get as you say barred for  being drunk or throwing things or getting into a fight which are all normal things going on in bars all the time  and imagine how he must feel being barred as you say for being boring… and everyone always knows about something like this I say and you are probably right Jack says about that as people talk and I am asking Jack if he misses drawing and he says not really-----there is a pause  with the obvious expectation----- but he is saying here I am in this apartment and it is very nice and I don’t know why I am here:  I think I must be getting away with something: I’m getting away with something he says again and I am confessing in some way in response to the silence--- which is a too grand of a word I say--- but it feels like it, when certain names are used when sometimes talking about  art:  I have never understood Picasso or Braque’s work--- and Jack says I don’t know--- people are always talking about them so I guess they knew what they were doing or people were saying they knew what they were doing but I never talked about them because no one ever asked me about them but it could have been because of the people I knew and I say the only painter I ever heard you talk about was Franz Kline and he says I don’t remember and I said it had nothing to do with the white and black paintings or how Kline thought the white part was the most important part but no one ever talked about the white part and only saw the black parts of his paintings which he never understood but you were telling me about being in the Cedar Tavern and he gave you some napkins and even signed them… he had been marking them up with a pen or something and it was just the two of you that night because most times he was always surrounded by all these people and you didn’t know what to talk about and here he was by himself and you  were sitting next to him and he pushed these across to you and then he took them back ad scrawled his name on them but didn’t say why he was doing this and you shoved them into your pocket and then sometime in the 60s you needed money so you had to sell them as you didn’t have any need for napkins signed by Franz Kline… so he was the only painter I ever heard you talk about, and Jack is saying if you say so and Rudy is in the room as it is probably time for me to be going and Jack is not wanting to stand up and I am saying you can change your t-shirt  now and I am saying Piret my wife is always telling me I dribble all the time and that is what men do they dribble all the time here there and everywhere and on anything but always always on their clean white t-shirts for sure their t-shirts, it’s something women learn to put up with, she says, if they want to be around a man while Jack is saying there’s another number I’m really afraid of: six, it’s such an incomplete sort of number and then in the movies they are always deep-sixing something or other while Rudy is tapping the back of Jack’s chair, you have to take a piss Jack, he says and then the exercise person is coming, this is a busy day and Jack is saying, I have to take a piss and while it is hard for him to get out of the chair he still saying, six and getting deep-sixed, that is what I am afraid of : they’re going to put an 86 on my forehead and then deep-sixing me out the window or into the toilet---

Jack, you’re so funny, Rudy says, and I watch Jack grab the walker—as he is pushing himself up from the chair and he begins to walk saying they were always deep-sixing things in the Navy movies during the war and I am always scared of being deep-sixed as you say and you never know when they are going to put an 86 on your head and then deep-six you out the window but I don’t think they would put me down the toilet as it would be better to put me out the window… at the door to the toilet Jack takes his hand off the walker and I shake it and we have a lot to talk about the next time I am saying and he is saying I am glad you came to visit…I hope you will come again…

copyright 2020 Thomas McGonigle

DIPTYCH BEFORE DYING a NOVEL in two panels

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