I Know A Guy - A Magpie Tale

Klaus Enrique Gerdes

Photo copied from Tess Kincaid's The Mag Go there for some terrific poetry and other work too. This gathering of talent has been going on for quite some time.

Found on Gerdes' website: "The works of photographer Klaus Enrique Gerdes offer an ambitious series of emotively charged images that dissect and re-invent the most relevant and affecting of our human issues. Collectively, they represent a landscape of a reality that is at once deeper than the images to which we are customarily exposed, and transcendent, above the snap-shots of the order of our routine and habit, overcoming particularities of existence to penetrate a world of universality, in which fundamental factors of life and death, defeat and triumph, surface to reveal a singular, intensely moving, image of the nature of our human condition.

"Born in 1975, gerdes grew up in mexico city. He studied genetics at the University of Nottingham, England, and received an MBA from Columbia Business School in the city of New York. Most of his professional career was spent as a freelance IT consultant before Gerdes turned to photography, which he studied at Parsons and at the School of Visual Arts. Gerdes began to receive worldwide attention in 2007 when his portrait of “mother & daughter” was short listed for the photographic portrait prize at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Gerdes had his first solo exhibition in 2008 at the Clementine Gallery in New York City. His work has also been featured in a growing number of group shows. Gerdes currently lives in London and Mexico City."

I don't know...sounds like a rich young man to me...
I'm not saying Gerdes is anything like the guy in my poem. What I am saying, fame is fickle and for every guy who makes his mark there are hundreds with equal or even greater talent we never hear about because there are things not related to talent that block connections we might otherwise make. There is a basic limit to the numbers of fair haired boys and girls in the public eye for one, more boys than girls too. The rest of the good ones find other ways besides fame and fortune. "Most of his professional career" written of a guy born in 1975, a guy not yet forty... Gerdes has been well positioned. Good for him. He obviously has sufficient talent.

I Know A Guy

I know a guy had
a few hits back in the day
and travels these days
busy doing summer
shows, lives modestly, he does.
Now this guy shows up
all flash and glory
and I heard his money came
with him - that he buys
the talent that plays
on his stage with him while he
preens in front of us.
What the hell?

June 3, 2012 11:39 AM

I do know that guy doing summer shows, his band holding together over thirty years, still welcomed in the smaller venues. He's a decent family guy raising his son, active at his son's school. It wasn't always so. I made up the other guy in the poem, but not out of whole cloth.

I'm not complaining about the boyos, not at all. I regret the system and after all this time on the planet, I especially regret having no real idea how to change it. You can't lay it at the feet of anyone specific. For all our attempts to rectify things and protect the weak ones, life still ain't fair. A large number of Utopians have tried and failed conspicuously. Sometimes and in some ways it is obvious we don't even want it fair. Fairness has been the thing associated with much of my discomfort all my life. There are two drivers in our public life, freedom and fairness. They conflict.

There's a guy younger than me is going down hard with brain cancer. Another younger yet just had a stroke, a clot plugging a vein in his neck. They operated successfully but he gets to recover for a time before he gets some of himself back. Meanwhile I bumble along with my long list of medical complaints, serious enough but still I'm upright. All those people nearby are struggling to get a meal and somewhere to stay and me, I'm out of work just hanging out in my house and I get to eat, for quite a while too. What the hell? I am sure not going out of my way to help in the face of how it's always been. If I tried I would quickly use up what little I do have. I regret that too.

Over my left shoulder the Yankees are beating the Tigers on TV and are at bat threatening another run. That's about right, considering bought talent, considering my quiescence and age, and I think it's time for my nap too. Signing out.