John Shklov

Alternate Realities

Some related links:

Weirdness of Quantum Mechanics The Different Dimensions of Reality, and The Third Dimension Folding Dimensions Parallel Universe in higher dimensions ? existence without time as a dimension The Psychoanalytic Status Of Social Reality

Image: Alternate Realities (3.5)
Image size: Approximately 5″ x 7″. Arches archival quality heavyweight cold pressed rough watercolor paper. Paints are as lightfast and archival as modern technology permits. Please see this page (CARPENTER’S SPECIAL: Peoples Art) for more information and to purchase.

(All rights and Copyright reserved: John Shklov, 2009)

In 1978/79 I was contracted to do a cover design for a book cover, a book featuring interviews of patients at Kalaupapa Leprosy (Hansen’s disease was pc in those days) Settlement. I visited Kalaupapa and met with workers, patients and bureaucrats. The patient’s stories made me cry then and when I read them today they still make me cry.

From the beginning of the project I felt like I was in a tube, a tunnel of human cruelty. The stories the patients told and the obvious still raw (excuse the pun) wounds of discrimination and cruelty convinced me from the start that I needed to use a fisheye lens to tell this story.

From the possible images, the one that the patients and the authors selected for the cover is of the “visiting room,” the room which the healthy family members would sit on one side of a wide table and the patients sat on the other.  I was told that originally it had a wire mesh screen running down the center of the table making touch even more difficult.  When I visited the long narrow room had no screen but had separate entrances from opposing sides and ends of the building.

For Polynesians, the title of the book, “The Separating Sickness” is important. Families in Polynesian culture are close and rending them apart by disease was a wrenching, tearing pain.  They called leprosy, “the separating sickness” because it tore their families apart often with enforced segregation.

The picture finally selected is an image of the room that families were forced to use to visit each other and the physical limitations were imposed to keep the people apart so they could not transmit the disease.  Yet, this image was the favorite choice of our patient advisors because of the cross they could see in the reflection on the ceiling.  Christianity, it turned out the survivors of Hansen’s disease asserted was a major part of their lives and a major reason for their spiritual and physical survival.  And Father Damien was the main symbol of that survival.

On the back cover we put a picture of Father Damien’s tomb and in the process of shooting around the church I was given access to the site of his confessional (no lights allowed, so I used trusty Tri-x and hand held it) and I took a few pictures.  The dark vestments hanging on a nail and the stools were just as he left them I was told then.  The hole on the floor where his open wounds drained during the long confessionals was there.  It was a sign of respect to leave things just like he would be back the next day.

A few weeks after I made the photo, a patient told me that a Belgian tourist group came through the church and the vestments disappeared.

In the second printing they changed my original black background I guess to soften the effect.  I still like the black better.  I don’t know if this book is still available.  It was a limited printing anyway, but perhaps the Catholic charity that funded it initially might reprint it again.  If they do, don’t plan on reading it without crying.

(All rights and Copyright reserved:  John Shklov 2009)

I found the latest incarntion of this book here. They used the Father Damien Grave Pictures as the cover which seems better now. The Separating Sickness

Please use these headers to your hearts content in your web design work.  They are formatted for the standard header size and have lots of nice spaces for text.  Please don’t resell them.  And if you can credit the maker, me, please do.  Oh, and another thing is that you need to click on the image and then right click for the downloads.

SOVEREIGNTY

She was a big girl. Sunny Keawe was built like a Polynesian goddess. A Hawaiian Queen Latifah, being part Samoan and part Hawaiian and raised in Waianae out in the country on a high protein diet, on canoe practice and hula. Her curves were large and generous no less woman-like for their size and underlying hard muscle structure. There was that attitude too, like “don’t you dare give me no shit haole boy or I’ll whip your ass good. What? No believe? Come here I’ll kick you from here to Waianae!” I liked her right at the start.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not talking any sexual stuff. I had no illusion that I would in any way have a boy-girl relationship with this huge woman from the North Shore of Oahu. It’s just that me and everyone else acknowledged the part of her that was feminine in nature. It was important to both the administration and the prisoners that she was a female and not a male. A woman, even a strong one like Sunny was less threatening to the “warden” who in those days was called “the administrator” or “program manager” and she was certainly more welcome to the overwhelmingly male prison where the prisoners welcomed any small whiff of woman. Any smell I thought was better than the normal smell you encounter in prisons. The smell being the first thing you notice inside a prison. It is the smell of urine and sweat, throw up, blood, feces and harsh and strong chemical cleansers mixed with the intangibles of death and fear. Especially fear, the smell of fear is deep and thick in prison. Once you smell it you never forget it is stuck somewhere up your nose.

For several years at Kolea Correctional Center I interviewed all visitors because as the education officer one of my duties was to keep track of volunteers and visitor access to the prisoners at a small outer island prison/jail facility and Sunny brought hope to the modules and something to do filling otherwise empty days reading the same books and magazines over and over. Sunny’s position was “soft money” government funded to help educate the ethnic Hawaiians to smooth the way for native prisoners reentry into the community at large. A part of her mandate was to teach Hawaiian history and to foster pride and dignity. That was what she was supposed to do, according to the memo from the bosses in Honolulu.

Our Sovereign Past

For the first few years all went well. Several times a year she held well attended seminars, at the day room, inside the modules, open to all prisoners regardless of classification, with no guards and only me, the educational manager, in attendance to monitor her safety.

The ultimate reward in prison, extra food, Sunny always brought lemonade and cookies which she gave to the cook to prepare for the break between classes. And at the end she always gave the men a certificate, a “pala pala” that they proudly took “home” to their cells. For some of them, it was the first “certificate” they had ever received. When I first started work with these men I did a survey and found that about 66% of them tested at the six grade or less education level. At almost every seminar or meeting that she gave at the facility if I had time to interview them and check them out on the computer we also invited “kupuna” or Hawaiian old timers from the local community . Once or twice I had some uneasy feelings about visitor identifications that didn’t quite jibe but it wasn’t until years later when I met one of the named regular attendees that I realized someone else had masqueraded as her, several times under my watchful gaze.

Two or three years progressed this way and Sunny and I got to know each other and worked together. As she taught these men throughout the state about their heritage and rights as Hawaiians, Sunny became more and more polarized and angry. The institutional qualities of her interactions demanded by the prison warders wore on her usually genial disposition. The business of Corrections is a giant “equal opportunity” grinder of prisoners and warders alike. It ground her down and involved her in conspiracies and relationships she would have otherwise avoided. In addition, she encountered the occupational hazard of radical organizers and workers, the hazard of the ‘Don Quixote” syndrome. Indicative of this syndrome, the “always’ part of always skating out far ahead of the crowd that is so lonely and frustrating to anyone, but so is the constant ridicule and sniping of the opposition aimed directly at the underpinnings of your self esteem. It all takes a toll. After awhile even you judge yourself a fool to be out there without apparent reward and without the satisfaction of any real victory. I watched Sunny Keawe become more and more militant as this process continued. Less and less would she talk about job training and gaining useful skills. Less and less she encouraged the feelings of remorse and guilt so important to inmate control. More and more the word “sovereignty “ became the title and theme song of her presentations.

Several times I had to reject kupuna volunteers she recommended because they were convicted felons. She preached personal and Hawaiian sovereignty. Soon, her interactions with the men began to reflect this bias. The men loved her and hung on her every word and action. As soon as some of the men began to complain that their sovereign rights as Hawaiians were being ignored and when they began using the prison system of written complaint, paperwork that now needed to be answered with paperwork, the guards that had to answer the paperwork really began paying more attention to her lectures.

First the bigger facilities on Oahu and then other outer islander facilities complained about her militant statements, the attitudes supposedly she engendered in the prisoners after her presentations. Sunny was finally officially labeled a troublemaker and despite her Federal moneys, she was banned from some of the jails and prisons in the state system.

But even as we recognized her approaching unwelcome status, we still welcomed Sunny at our facility. My independent and liberal boss, an ex roommate of the then governor, used to be a counselor, now was the prison manager very tolerant and I figured that anything that got the prisoners to read the newspaper instead of watching reruns or some other mindless drivel on the telly was good and productive use of their time. From a lifetime of liberal practice and bias I welcomed her on the basis that any education was better than nothing. Besides I thought, I believe in my own personal sovereignty, don’t I? Whatever that means? A few days before her regularly scheduled presentation my boss took me aside and told me that we had to reign Sunny in or discontinue her visits. The Honolulu administration had recently changed and the corrections program mangers had all been notified that unless she laid off the sovereignty stuff she had to go. Too much trouble. Too much prisoner anxiety left in the wake of her visits. Now they said Sunny created more work for the guards not less. Earlier that month, Sunny had been reprimanded and cautioned by the System educational program manager and told her mandate was to teach integration and reentry into the community not Hawaiian Sovereignty and if she didn’t stick to her mandate she would be denied entry to the system. My job I was told was to sit in on her entire presentation and report what she said. I blushed when I realized. I was the rat.

Locked in the day room with 60 or so hard core criminals and one huge Polynesian woman, I sat and listened. Sunny was used to me sitting in on her presentations. At the point her comments started to get too careless and anti-institutional I usually left, discretion I always considered to be the better part of valor. This time as the tone of her talk changed, telegraphing a move to harsher, stronger, more conspiratorial dialog, instead of leaving I stayed. Her body language became agitated and she moved more frequently about the room and despite my presence continued on pell mell her anger and agitation maintaining an inertia of it’s own. She settled in the opposite corner of the room from my perch on a table top where this day I rudely and on purpose sat, on the same table the prisoners ate their meals. I had the cook position the cart of cookies and aluminum pitchers of cold sweating lemonade by my side, Prison is after all a place where not even the smallest detail is deleted from the bright psychological relief. Lights were turned off in the glassed in control room yet I could spy the gleam of brass as several correctional officers watched and listened to Sunny’s presentation.

What compelled my specific comments and my next actions I really don’t know. It was like I was blindly following the preordained script fate had written previously for me. I was an actor speaking the words on a very volatile stage. When Sunny finished stirring the entitlement broth and asked for questions, I spoke up precipitously from across the room. It was nasty politics. It was sabotage. Her big brown eyes stabbed back at me. Now I don’t recall the exact words I used but I remember all the black hair angry heads black eyes swivel to me as I politely if effetely inquired perhaps in the scheme of conflict and environmental problems in the world today, specific issues of Hawaiian Sovereignty might just be a little irrelevant in the overall scheme of things? It was like the world stood still, a prison day room commercial on television, for the inmates froze and held their breath as she locked eyes with me and walked the 40 or 50 feet between us.

When she reached my side she leaned over and clasped me in a warm embrace. I was conscious of her soft breasts pressed against my shoulder. Her warm words came out her breath next to my ear and Sunny retold and reinterpreted to our audience of violent men what I said. She said my words had embraced the cause and I should be supported. She spoke of how I endorsed what Hawaiian Sovereignty meant and generally what a great “bruddah” I was. She stood now beside me, I still sat on the table top, an absolute puppet and embarassingly aware of her breasts now next to my face as she continued to cuddle me and talk whatever shit came in to her head. Despite my obvious compromised position incredibly my first impulse was to open my mouth and tell everyone she had stupidly misinterpreted what I meant to say. I opened my mouth to do so and I looked up sidelong into her eyes as Sunny’s fingers pressed with incredible pain and pressure and strength into my shoulder. I knew then she had known my measure from the start. As I hopped off the table top I understood what I had to say.

“lemonade and cookies, gentlemen?”

Kalakaua

John Shklov

Kapaa, Summer 2004

(All rights and Copyright reserved: John Shklov, 2009)

The Global Consciousness Project, also called the EGG Project, is an international, multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others. We collect data continuously from a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites around the world. The archive contains more than 10 years of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials every second.

Image: Global consciousness  (2.5)
All paintings are painted on Arches archival quality heavyweight cold pressed rough watercolor paper. Paints are as lightfast and archival as modern technology permits. Please see this page (CARPENTER’S SPECIAL: Peoples Art) for more information about this reasonably priced series and to purchase.

(All rights and Copyright reserved: John Shklov, 2009)

New series of small watercolors is fun

The Dating Dance

Image: Dating Dance (3.5)
Image: Dating Dance/w/lust (3.5)
All paintings (approx. 5 x 7 inches painted surface) in this series are painted on Arches archival quality heavyweight (300lb) cold pressed rough watercolor paper. Paints are as lightfast and archival as modern technnology permits. Please see this page (CARPENTER’S SPECIAL: Peoples Art) for more information about this reasonably priced series and to purchase.
(All rights and Copyright reserved: John Shklov, 2009

Some links about the subject:

The Dating Dance – How To Know Someone?
The Dating Dance: A Guide for Women Dating Women (Paperback)
The Dating Dance: Confessions of the Spider and the Fly
How to Perform the Dating Dance

A Perfect Day In Hawaii
John Shklov

---

And that was our plan, to hike up along the narrowing mountain ridgeback to the highest place with a windbreak and a view.  Once at the spot we would cook our lunch and enjoy the island views of Oahu beneath and beyond our feet.  We were an odd little male only group.  David who had just completed a six year enlistment stint in the Air Force was still very much the master sergeant and was certainly the father figure while my six-year-old son Mickey and I were like the children.  David was in charge and this was his hike, a day off boys only.  David and I didn’t go hiking together often.  This was his gift to me in the midst of my martial woes.

Later as we got higher and higher on the trail, as the Northeast wind got fierce and the other hikers became fewer and finally we were alone on a narrow 10 foot switchback with a few large boulders for shelter against the prevailing winds.  On either side of the ridge were cliffs hundreds of feet down to the thick jungle below.  One slip and it was certain death and down below the wild pigs would most likely scavange and scatter your remains.  We were all careful to stay in the middle portion of the ridge.

We spent a magic couple of hours there cooking and eating our hot dogs and beans and rice and philosophizing about the city beneath before we packed up our gear and returned down the mountain to the city below.  The sense of danger from the treacherous trail and the insistent and sometimes unexpected wind bursts made for a high level of adrenaline I am sure and I’ve often wondered if that was what made my recollections of the day so bright and sparkling?

Before the hot dogs and chips, before the sitting down happily full and making fun of the citizens below working on a weekday, before all that, we parked our car and locked up the valuables in the car trunk at the impromtu dirt parking lot near the start of the trail.  As we organized our belongs  I noticed a local couple holding hands going on ahead of us.  She was “full figured gal” as they say, with a tight pair of jeans and a pale green t-shit.  He was big man and was in jeans and a t-shirt also but with a dingy gray hooded sweatshirt.

As it turned out they were about 20 minutes or more ahead of us as we had to pack our food and stuff in the knapsacks and David felt constrained  to give solemn instruction to each of us as to our responsibilities and especially to me to watch out  for Mickey who was just having fun and not much aware of the serious need to be careful as the hike could be very dangerous due to the narrow trail and the wind.

Before the brush and trees turned into windswept mountain ridge there was a mountain trail and on either side of the trail there were small nooks and crannies that people often used as lover’s hideaways or just family camping.  After the Vietnam conflict and the men returned it was rumored that some of them periodically made their way into the hills to rely on their survivor skills, but  this day the other hikers were young folks and some tourists. I only noticed the one campsite that day.

The camp was pitched in an idyllic little grove away from the wind, the bright yellow sun flickered on a small breeze buffered by the hump of the hill away from prevailing winds. The shining light through the trees rendered the leaves a watercolor painting of shades of green and yellows.

As we passed I spied the couple that had preceded us on the hike up the hill as they snuggled into their two-person tent, just their legs and feet showing beyond the deep shade inside the tent.  I could just see his gray sweatshirt as he lay below her on a slight slope in the tent floor.

A few feet away they had a campfire set up with a pot actually cooking while smoke twisted up in a circle like a postcard.  The whole scene in the dappled sunlight was so pretty and peaceful and perhaps because I was involved in a nasty divorce at the time I remember comparing the idyllic scene to my own life, feeling jealous of the people in the tent and wishing that I was he and his woman was my woman.  The whole scene seemed so perfect, a museum display that  I remember thinking at the time that I could reach out and touch it, like a nativity crèche in which you can reach in and move the figures around.  I thought it should have “objects may appear closer than they actually are” stamped on it like a rear view mirror.  When I see the warning on the mirror sometimes I still think about this little scene.

On the way back down the path I slowed and made sure to peek at the happy couple as we passed the tent, the fire now just smoldering and the couple in the tent, their legs and feet just showing as I remembered on the way up the hill.  Sweet untroubled sleep I  thought.

A few weeks later I was contentedly sitting at a concrete table on Kuhio beach, waiting for my running partner Howard Cho to come back from the bath room he always used when his cousin worked the front at the Denny’s across the street  from the completion of a weekly  3 or 4 mile run through Waikiki.  I picked up the Honolulu Advertiser someone had put under a small piece of coral on the bench away from the prevailing wind.  The front page and some sections were missing, but   3 or 4 pages back in section A was a small article that immediately caught my eye and it went something like:

The bodies of a couple were recently found in their pup tent on the hiking trail above St. Louis Heights.  The bodies had apparently been there for some time as the tent was clearly visible from the trail.  Decomposing odors from the site alerted hikers who investigated and called authorities.  Foul play is not suspected.

I was definitely blown away by what I had just read and when Howard came back from the bathroom I suggested we return immediately to our cars in the Zoo parking lot.  I needed time to think this over?  What did it mean?

The sea sparkled off the little waves.  The bright Hawaiian sun spread dappled shade beneath  the big Banyan tree on the lawn outside the Honolulu Zoo.  Howard turned to me and smiled ” it’s a perfect day in Hawaii, isn’t it?

(All rights and Copyright reserved: John Shklov, Apr 11th, 2007)

Artifacts of our conciousness

The Incident at Walls

john shklov

Written April 06, 2009

When I was growing up during summer vacation almost everyday my gang of Bishop Tract Kalihi kids used to jump on the bus, clutching our “pipo” boards riding through Honolulu to the end of Waikiki ending at Kuhio beach, the surf spot known as “Walls.” At Walls we would eagerly disembark walking up the sidewalk straight out the pier, stashing our clothes and flip flops along the small 2 foot wall at the edge. After years of body surfing this spot, we knew exactly where the “hole” was when jumping off the 15ft cement structure into the water to avoid the coral and scrape or break a leg. You had to time it right too. Just when the wave peaked about 10 feet before it slapped the concrete you jumped. Timing in surfing, like in life is everything.

About 10 feet down, along the side of the major wall of the pier a dark gray cement abutment ran parallel to the surf line and the beach. If I got tired of body surfing sometimes I lay on the thin cool velvety green covering of sea weed that covered this solid concrete breakwater. If the tide was high you could lay on the top, your cheek pressed against the smooth seaweed and clutch the side as the waves washed over you.

One day at high tide, after getting bored with the small choppy waves I let a wave wash me back over the side to the protected section where the mothers with babies and the stewardesses and Waikiki characters and habitué’s hung out. In those days, Kuhio beach was a “peoples” beach. The nearby apartments housed workers and semi-permanent population of drifters who felt it a duty to sit on the beach and soak up the sun at least once a week. It was fun people watching. The girls were pretty in their bathing suits and the kids were always getting into mischief. When I was a keiki my mother God bless her, caught sight of a man watching the kids and masturbating under a towel. She got right up and went over to him standing close, her legs firmly anchored and fists on her hips and she asked him loudly what he was doing and to “please remove the towel so I can see what you are doing!” The man left the beach immediately. There was always something to see at Kuhio beach.

So, like I was saying, one day I was laying on the sand, drifting in and out, day dreaming a young man’s dreams and I noticed an old lady slip off the breakwater ,the wrong way, into the surge in front. Even though it was high tide, in between the sets you could set your feet down on the coral and I thought she would be okay. I put my head on the wet sand for awhile and watched a young mother in a green bathing suit herd her little blond boy.

When I looked up again,the old lady was much farther out to sea, now struggling to get back, her head much lower in the water. I realized that she was in real trouble. Back in the day, there were no lifeguards on this section of the beach and I figured pretty much I was it so got up and I walked over to the water and swam out in her direction through the left gap in the breakwater and now I could see her face. She was completely panicked and thrashing and flailing about. Her eyes locked on to me watching me. She reminded me of my grandmother. Then she disappeared under water as a wave washed over her. I swam out looking and she bobbed up even farther out. Another wave pushed her under.

She was drifting underwater the moment I finally reached her, and the terror had seized her completely. The old lady grabbed my head and pushed me under as she attempted to climb up my body out of the water with an amazing strength of purpose. I had to dive under away and come up behind her as my lifeguard training had taught and I yelled at her to calm down and I put her on her back, my arms around her chest and started to half paddle with one arm and kick us both to shore.

I reached the shore with the old lady in tow. The beach was calm. Nobody paid us any attention. The pretty mother in the green suit still walked after the little blond boy. I helped the old lady out of the water and to her feet. She had on a worn bathing suit with little yellow and blue flowers and sort of a chunky eastern European look, like my Jewish grandmother. Her bathing suit looked like a kitchen table pattern I thought. I gently turned her around as she got up so I could see into her eyes. I wondered what she would say.

Aside from me telling her to calm down we had not spoken. Only for a moment did I glimpse her contemptuous eyes, brown  like my own, then without a word she spun on her heel and walked away down the beach.

(All rights and Copyright reserved:  John Shklov March 06, 2009)

I’ve been exploring the image that is associated with this I Ching reading, IC/24.  So far I have a couple of images as a starting point.  Please pardon the reflections.

and the following image is another 8×10 canvas but with different color combinations. I don’t particularly think this works as well as the above image but include it for reference.

IC/24

And here is another color test. I am trying to see what colors will work against the white. I’ll do black background today.

green above flash below