MUSINGS

MAGICAL MUSINGS:

“Dear Landlord”

October 1st, 2003

I always find it amazing that so many of you are comfortable with coming into my home, handing me money and finding your place. But why not? Why not support your local artist(s) instead of financing the trillions of pre-programmed institutions that keep you fed, drunk, dazed and fucked, all designed to rob you of independence? Anyway... thanks... the intimacy of a place like this beats the loneliness of all that manufactured group hysteria... it beats like a heart!

Many of you know my situation. The Burkhart Underground is not a business or a venue… not even a coffee house or art gallery. It’s just my home, and I’ve lived in and maintained this little house for 18 years now. I don’t own it, although I’ve paid the increasing rents on the place, made repairs, fixed it up and treated it like it was (and still is) my very own... but at any given moment I may have to leave it all behind.

The landlord owns the entire block (as well as other properties around town). Eventually my house is destined to be torn down and replaced with a condo. In the meantime, the parcel remains in trust. But of course he and I are part of an even more complex trust, honoring an ancient debt as substantial as the intricate relations that hold the planets in check.

It’s my home, yes, by virtue of grace… a blessing. And you may also understand that my only family exists here -- it is the family we re-affirm every Sunday night when we come together to make art and worship the Creator we all hold in common. We are equally blessed with this unity of souls. It’s an ancient formula, yet my daughter taught it to me while she was still in her infancy. The formula is called LOVE.

When Trinity was born here 17 years ago she brought with her a vast amount of that love… it was enough to open her own heart, with lots left over to share with others. So what you feel here as peace is really the love she deposited willingly so many years ago, fully knowing that one day she will reach a magic age and return to collect the dividends that you and I have been trusted with to increase in her name.

The truth is, she welcomes each of us to share in the interest on her initial deposit, whether we increase it or not. Truly, the love you feel here in my home is the love my daughter left for our combined direction. This is her family too, although she is currently away on a mission, seeking to enlighten those who are bent on sucking out her very soul – she seeks only to return love to them, seeks only to dissolve their ignorance.

A small child whose only salvation lies in a tiny corner of her own fragile psyche, linking her to the one stable situation she has ever known – this house, this home. And why not… this is the home of Christ.

And now the story gets interesting! My landlord, an old Jew, has just died. To me, he was like the father I never had, although I am not Jewish. It's a spiritual connection, after all. It was because of his patient concern for me that I was able to remain these 18 years on Halsted Street, when everyone from the City of Chicago to my upwardly-mobile neighbors have attempted to unseat me.

He watched as I transformed this derelict and crumbling building into a house of some artistic repute. Legally he was cautious, as I plodded ahead through every violation I was met with… assorted warnings from the city. This place is a tax write-off for his estate, yet I am continually reinventing and improving it as a profit (prophet). A true conflict of interest, it would seem.

Once, when the landlord visited to question my senses, his wife tagged along: “I don’t know why you don’t tear this house down, Leonard, and be done with it!” “But dear… where would Burkhart go?” “Well he can go to hell as far as I’m concerned!” Yes, he understood that this is my home. And his one gift to me was to hold me accountable.

When I came here years ago, I was a mess! At 45 I had squandered half those years in drink and drugs and had only glimpsed a new beginning with the pending birth of my daughter. At 45, clean and sober for nearly four years, I had yet to find the stability that would establish me in the community. Of course this man, my landlord, perceived this…

“Do you have money to pay the rent?” he asked me over the telephone when I got in touch from the For Rent sign. “Well… yes…” “Then you’ll need it to get started… you can send the rent next month.” “What about a deposit?” “I don’t need a deposit from you… I trust you.”

There’s that trust I was talking about. Something he demonstrated to me. Yet he had never met me. Incredibly, I was not to lay eyes on him for the first six years of my residence here!

I said that this was a house of Christ. When my daughter’s mother and I were looking for a place to live, we were unwittingly following the path of Joseph and Mary. We could find “no room at the inn,” and had all of our belongings in the back of a U-Haul truck that was due to be returned the next day. Exhausted and worn out from searching for apartments, we pulled up to a parking spot and got out to stretch. She was five months pregnant; I was out of my element.

“Look, Fred… this house has a For Rent sign on it!” Only she would see this; I was used to living in storefronts and lofts, and even the streets and alleys. Well how about that! In fact, it turns out the place had been for rent for exactly nine months, waiting on its tennants.

Trinity’s mom is gone. She ran off with the caretaker years ago, taking my 9-year old daughter with her. But I’m still here tending the home fires. So what is the future of any of this… the future of the Burkhart Underground?

With the landlord dead, many have attempted to council me, telling me I should begin to look elsewhere. For what… another coffeehouse? Ha. The Underground grew out of me living here and persisting; it grew out of my desire to have a family. The coffeehouse is Trinity coming home every week with all her friends, leaving me to wash the dishes and clean up after. It’s just the way I live. It’s the art I envision. I certainly won’t take the coffee cups with me when I go!

The truth is, I’m not leaving. The relationship between the landlord and me existed before I got here; it exists still. His will is in probate, for how long I don’t know, but my will is here. I am preparing the coffeehouse schedule for November. I am looking forward to seeing many of you this month. I just want you to know how special you are. How uncanny it seems to me that you come into my home and hand me money, fill up the place with your feelings and expressions, and take away my loneliness forever. It’s really love, isn’t it?!

and now...

The World Through A Photographer’s Words

Written in gratitude for Harold R. Rodinsky
and his class of visionaries,
those that see the world through writer’s eyes
September 11th, 2003

John Wayne Gacy, serial killer extraordinaire, said “I’m not so concerned with the photograph they use to depict me in the papers after I am gone… it’s the caption they’ll put under it that bothers me.” Well, duh!

Gacy and I had a conversation back in the 90’s when we negotiated having me photograph his execution. Of course he was right… it’s the captions – it’s the words we choose to interpret the pictures that have the ultimate meaning for life. Reality is often glossed over and distorted because of the erroneous words we choose to decipher it.

For example: one year Usama Bin Laden is our “ally;” the next year, he’s our “enemy.” It was like that with the Japanese and the Germans and the Jews, and still is with the rotating list of all people and all lands and everything else in history (or her story), especially during this politically correct revision that unravels all we previously held to be true.

As a photographer, I have had the privilege of hanging out with every kind of person on this planet – racists, both black and white, the greedy, both homeless and wealthy, the straights and the gays and the crookeds, the church goers and the young liberals, the very young and the very old, the pros and the cons of all of it – the many who accept me and the many who don’t. And in every relationship I was asked to put away my own interpretations – my own words – and listen to theirs. And in order to understand our differences, I have endeavored to do just that.

Still, this matter of labeling – thinking and writing and speaking -- is of supreme importance. I’m reminded of a group of inexperienced college kids, weekend drinkers from the suburbs that frequent the wealthy Lakeview neighborhood, arriving in packs to experience the ever-newer variety of sport’s bars that proliferate the landscape. One of them stood in front of my photo display laughing at a picture of a knocked-out derelict crashed in a pile of vomit and blood at the curbside. Naturally the kid had his own caption: “Yo… there goes me on Sunday morning!”

Well, you can see that this caption is part of the problem. Because this privileged kid will probably never become destitute and without family or institution to back him, lying forlorn and forgotten at a public curbside. He won’t even be able to conceive of such a position in life. But this kid was doing what he always does… reflecting on his own vanity, not on the truth of his fellow man.

So I have to do it… I have to reflect on the truth that transcends my own ego and understanding, because our awareness of each other will not grow one iota otherwise. And maybe you have to do it too. We think we know who we are, and from that vantage point, we put everybody else in their humble places. But who are we kidding? If they are nothing… then we are next to nothing. We think we know it all… but it’s really everybody else that knows it all. What did the wise man council us? “Thinker… know thyself!”

The Beat writer William S. Burroughs called to task the tired old saying, “In the Beginning was the Word…” In the beginning of what, is what William wanted to know. Well, in the beginning of writing is what he found out.

It would appear that prior to writing, the alphabet and the subsequent words it fostered were very different phenomena than the ones we have grown accustomed to. In essence, the original alphabet was (and still is) a series of 22 fundamental equations that was established in the beginning and revealed as the Law. These symbols were, no more or less, mathematical formulae that testified to the unknown structure of the universe.

In the beginning, the original alphabets contained only numbers, not letters. These ancient peoples composed their texts with numbers, not letters, as they measured their newly evolving place in the universe. It was all measurement and mathematics and stuff like geometry and algebra and calculus, but they didn't call it that. The Hebrews just spoke it. It was aleph out loud and beth in the beginning. The Greeks had their alpha and omega too, while the Egyptians just painted pictures and hieroglyphics about it.

Confusing? Or revealing.

Writing is the one art form that potentially everyone participates in. Sure, we grow up laughing and dancing and drawing and singing and wanting to be some of everything we learn about. But for most of us it finally stops. Yet writing continues: grocery lists, diary entries, poems and possible life stories. Everyone’s life is so unique… who hasn’t heard it before? “You should write a book!”

They don’t tell us, “You should make a painting.” The truth is: it’s already a painting, this earth and the colors upon it. We alter the basic picture when we change the way we look at it.

Adam and Eve in their infancy changed the primeval paradise from being “all good” (that’s god’s definition) to being a world full of segregation -- good and evil. And it only took them one blissful night under the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to conceive the two kids that would holster the destruction for them for all time. You know the story -- one brother killed the other one and proved once and for all that “we are right” and “they are wrong.” Ad infinitum.

But we can change it back to paradise through our words and writing. It doesn’t even matter if the words are true for everyone else – they only have to be true for the individual who pens them. With our words as road maps we can set out on a new pilgrimage of peace. What makes a difference in each life is not whether everyone else is true, or peace loving, or honest… it matters only whether the individual is. It matters whether I am.

And I am inviting you all to come back and share your writing with the rest of us...

Fred Burkhart

Relax in Private Art Studios


	HOME RETURN TO THE COFFEEHOUSE MENU SCHEDULE \| VIEWS \| PERFORMERS \| FLYERS \| ALL AGES \| ARTICLES \| PURPOSE \| RELATED \| LINKS \| MUSINGS \| BACK MAGICAL MUSINGS: “Dear Landlord” October 1st, 2003 I always find it amazing that so many of you are comfortable with coming into my home, handing me money and finding your place. But why not? Why not support your local artist(s) instead of financing the trillions of pre-programmed institutions that keep you fed, drunk, dazed and fucked, all designed to rob you of independence? Anyway... thanks... the intimacy of a place like this beats the loneliness of all that manufactured group hysteria... it beats like a heart! Many of you know my situation. The Burkhart Underground is not a business or a venue… not even a coffee house or art gallery. It’s just my home, and I’ve lived in and maintained this little house for 18 years now. I don’t own it, although I’ve paid the increasing rents on the place, made repairs, fixed it up and treated it like it was (and still is) my very own... but at any given moment I may have to leave it all behind. The landlord owns the entire block (as well as other properties around town). Eventually my house is destined to be torn down and replaced with a condo. In the meantime, the parcel remains in trust. But of course he and I are part of an even more complex trust, honoring an ancient debt as substantial as the intricate relations that hold the planets in check. It’s my home, yes, by virtue of grace… a blessing. And you may also understand that my only family exists here -- it is the family we re-affirm every Sunday night when we come together to make art and worship the Creator we all hold in common. We are equally blessed with this unity of souls. It’s an ancient formula, yet my daughter taught it to me while she was still in her infancy. The formula is called LOVE. When Trinity was born here 17 years ago she brought with her a vast amount of that love… it was enough to open her own heart, with lots left over to share with others. So what you feel here as peace is really the love she deposited willingly so many years ago, fully knowing that one day she will reach a magic age and return to collect the dividends that you and I have been trusted with to increase in her name. The truth is, she welcomes each of us to share in the interest on her initial deposit, whether we increase it or not. Truly, the love you feel here in my home is the love my daughter left for our combined direction. This is her family too, although she is currently away on a mission, seeking to enlighten those who are bent on sucking out her very soul – she seeks only to return love to them, seeks only to dissolve their ignorance. A small child whose only salvation lies in a tiny corner of her own fragile psyche, linking her to the one stable situation she has ever known – this house, this home. And why not… this is the home of Christ. And now the story gets interesting! My landlord, an old Jew, has just died. To me, he was like the father I never had, although I am not Jewish. It's a spiritual connection, after all. It was because of his patient concern for me that I was able to remain these 18 years on Halsted Street, when everyone from the City of Chicago to my upwardly-mobile neighbors have attempted to unseat me. He watched as I transformed this derelict and crumbling building into a house of some artistic repute. Legally he was cautious, as I plodded ahead through every violation I was met with… assorted warnings from the city. This place is a tax write-off for his estate, yet I am continually reinventing and improving it as a profit (prophet). A true conflict of interest, it would seem. Once, when the landlord visited to question my senses, his wife tagged along: “I don’t know why you don’t tear this house down, Leonard, and be done with it!” “But dear… where would Burkhart go?” “Well he can go to hell as far as I’m concerned!” Yes, he understood that this is my home. And his one gift to me was to hold me accountable. When I came here years ago, I was a mess! At 45 I had squandered half those years in drink and drugs and had only glimpsed a new beginning with the pending birth of my daughter. At 45, clean and sober for nearly four years, I had yet to find the stability that would establish me in the community. Of course this man, my landlord, perceived this… “Do you have money to pay the rent?” he asked me over the telephone when I got in touch from the For Rent sign. “Well… yes…” “Then you’ll need it to get started… you can send the rent next month.” “What about a deposit?” “I don’t need a deposit from you… I trust you.” There’s that trust I was talking about. Something he demonstrated to me. Yet he had never met me. Incredibly, I was not to lay eyes on him for the first six years of my residence here! I said that this was a house of Christ. When my daughter’s mother and I were looking for a place to live, we were unwittingly following the path of Joseph and Mary. We could find “no room at the inn,” and had all of our belongings in the back of a U-Haul truck that was due to be returned the next day. Exhausted and worn out from searching for apartments, we pulled up to a parking spot and got out to stretch. She was five months pregnant; I was out of my element. “Look, Fred… this house has a For Rent sign on it!” Only she would see this; I was used to living in storefronts and lofts, and even the streets and alleys. Well how about that! In fact, it turns out the place had been for rent for exactly nine months, waiting on its tennants. Trinity’s mom is gone. She ran off with the caretaker years ago, taking my 9-year old daughter with her. But I’m still here tending the home fires. So what is the future of any of this… the future of the Burkhart Underground? With the landlord dead, many have attempted to council me, telling me I should begin to look elsewhere. For what… another coffeehouse? Ha. The Underground grew out of me living here and persisting; it grew out of my desire to have a family. The coffeehouse is Trinity coming home every week with all her friends, leaving me to wash the dishes and clean up after. It’s just the way I live. It’s the art I envision. I certainly won’t take the coffee cups with me when I go! The truth is, I’m not leaving. The relationship between the landlord and me existed before I got here; it exists still. His will is in probate, for how long I don’t know, but my will is here. I am preparing the coffeehouse schedule for November. I am looking forward to seeing many of you this month. I just want you to know how special you are. How uncanny it seems to me that you come into my home and hand me money, fill up the place with your feelings and expressions, and take away my loneliness forever. It’s really love, isn’t it?! *and now...* The World Through A Photographer’s Words Written in gratitude for Harold R. Rodinsky and his class of visionaries, those that see the world through writer’s eyes September 11th, 2003 John Wayne Gacy, serial killer extraordinaire, said “I’m not so concerned with the photograph they use to depict me in the papers after I am gone… it’s the caption they’ll put under it that bothers me.” Well, duh! Gacy and I had a conversation back in the 90’s when we negotiated having me photograph his execution. Of course he was right… it’s the captions – it’s the words we choose to interpret the pictures that have the ultimate meaning for life. Reality is often glossed over and distorted because of the erroneous words we choose to decipher it. For example: one year Usama Bin Laden is our “ally;” the next year, he’s our “enemy.” It was like that with the Japanese and the Germans and the Jews, and still is with the rotating list of all people and all lands and everything else in history (or her story), especially during this politically correct revision that unravels all we previously held to be true. As a photographer, I have had the privilege of hanging out with every kind of person on this planet – racists, both black and white, the greedy, both homeless and wealthy, the straights and the gays and the crookeds, the church goers and the young liberals, the very young and the very old, the pros and the cons of all of it – the many who accept me and the many who don’t. And in every relationship I was asked to put away my own interpretations – my own words – and listen to theirs. And in order to understand our differences, I have endeavored to do just that. Still, this matter of labeling – thinking and writing and speaking -- is of supreme importance. I’m reminded of a group of inexperienced college kids, weekend drinkers from the suburbs that frequent the wealthy Lakeview neighborhood, arriving in packs to experience the ever-newer variety of sport’s bars that proliferate the landscape. One of them stood in front of my photo display laughing at a picture of a knocked-out derelict crashed in a pile of vomit and blood at the curbside. Naturally the kid had his own caption: “Yo… there goes me on Sunday morning!” Well, you can see that this caption is part of the problem. Because this privileged kid will probably never become destitute and without family or institution to back him, lying forlorn and forgotten at a public curbside. He won’t even be able to conceive of such a position in life. But this kid was doing what he always does… reflecting on his own vanity, not on the truth of his fellow man. So I have to do it… I have to reflect on the truth that transcends my own ego and understanding, because our awareness of each other will not grow one iota otherwise. And maybe you have to do it too. We think we know who we are, and from that vantage point, we put everybody else in their humble places. But who are we kidding? If they are nothing… then we are next to nothing. We think we know it all… but it’s really everybody else that knows it all. What did the wise man council us? “Thinker… know thyself!” The Beat writer William S. Burroughs called to task the tired old saying, “In the Beginning was the Word…” In the beginning of what, is what William wanted to know. Well, in the beginning of writing is what he found out. It would appear that prior to writing, the alphabet and the subsequent words it fostered were very different phenomena than the ones we have grown accustomed to. In essence, the original alphabet was (and still is) a series of 22 fundamental equations that was established in the beginning and revealed as the Law. These symbols were, no more or less, mathematical formulae that testified to the unknown structure of the universe. In the beginning, the original alphabets contained only numbers, not letters. These ancient peoples composed their texts with numbers, not letters, as they measured their newly evolving place in the universe. It was all measurement and mathematics and stuff like geometry and algebra and calculus, but they didn't call it that. The Hebrews just spoke it. It was aleph out loud and beth in the beginning. The Greeks had their alpha and omega too, while the Egyptians just painted pictures and hieroglyphics about it. Confusing? Or revealing. Writing is the one art form that potentially everyone participates in. Sure, we grow up laughing and dancing and drawing and singing and wanting to be some of everything we learn about. But for most of us it finally stops. Yet writing continues: grocery lists, diary entries, poems and possible life stories. Everyone’s life is so unique… who hasn’t heard it before? “You should write a book!” They don’t tell us, “You should make a painting.” The truth is: it’s already a painting, this earth and the colors upon it. We alter the basic picture when we change the way we look at it. Adam and Eve in their infancy changed the primeval paradise from being “all good” (that’s god’s definition) to being a world full of segregation -- good and evil. And it only took them one blissful night under the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to conceive the two kids that would holster the destruction for them for all time. You know the story -- one brother killed the other one and proved once and for all that “we are right” and “they are wrong.” Ad infinitum. But we can change it back to paradise through our words and writing. It doesn’t even matter if the words are true for everyone else – they only have to be true for the individual who pens them. With our words as road maps we can set out on a new pilgrimage of peace. What makes a difference in each life is not whether everyone else is true, or peace loving, or honest… it matters only whether the individual is. It matters whether I am. And I am inviting you all to come back and share your writing with the rest of us... Fred Burkhart Relax in Private Art Studios Appointment: 1228 N. Noble St. (coach house) Chicago, 60622 (773 348-8536)