Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

I have always called them my Pips
a variation on Shintoism, I think.

It's not exactly ancestor worship
more an enforced reverence for the dead

Every time I have lost a friend, I imagine them
joining this ghostly chorus of background singers

They do the little patent leather dance steps and snap their fingers
and say 'yeah' and 'amen' and 'remember, you are living for us.'

Today I learned that another friend had gone to join my Pips.
I have too many Pips. They are starting to look like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

http://www.dreamagic.com/poetry/liebermann.html

In memorium

Gabriel Liebermann aka smArtAttack

The very first member of our site.

He kindly hosted our site when we first opened it up.

He had a website for his dog, Babette.

Babette wrote poetry.

And she sang with him and danced on her hind legs.

She had a following on the internet.

People would write to Babette and Babette would write poetry back to the people.

Gabriel would come by to visit and bring Babette to dance and sing for us.

We'd all talk until the wee hours of the morning about mathematics, physics, relationships, love, the way the world fits and doesn't fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

I am proud and honored to have had the opportunity to meet Gabriel.

He gave us his book.... "My Nose"... full of light, comical poetry illustrated by the author.

Gabriel was a talented visual artist and a man with a beautiful heart.

I only met him a handful of times but I will never forget him and will miss him.

He had one of the most brilliant minds I have ever encountered.

His mind explored places, ideas, connections, truths, we can all only dream of conceiving.

A couple of months ago, Gabriel sent LR an email and told him he had a tumor removed.

They could slice his head and take it out of his brain, but they could never remove his mind and how it touched mine.

To Gabriel .... to his heart, his intellect, his vast creativity....

Rest peacefully, my friend.

You will be remembered fondly.

Babette will forever sing for you and I join in the choir.

We'll see you when we get there.

my first pip was joey rosenthal. Elementry school friend. I must have been about ten, scared me, I thought it was a nightmare. But it was not. Something more than just a memory trace the dead leave us I think.


Rest peacefully, Gabriel
You will be remembered fondly

Gabriel was only about 56.

So young.

Life is so fragile.

Treasure every moment.

That was an early age to experience losing a friend, gypsy!

The strange part about it is that it doesn't get any easier no matter how old you are, no matter how many you have seen leave.

Maybe one day you will be able to say hello to Joey Rosenthal again.

I want to believe we all continue somehow, some way....

I truly want to believe that.

If physics is true, energy cannot die. It must continue.

And life is energy.

It can be transformed, but it cannot die.

Clay has been here with me for 3 years. During that period of time, 4 friends of his have died.... none self inflicted, all natural causes.

Life is a bittersweet event. People live on in our hearts.

Babette La Dish.

I forgot to type in her entire name.

Babette La Dish.

Why is death allowed?

I don't understand it.

I love Gabriel & Babette La Dish.

Who is feeding Babette and walking her today?

Who is inspiring her to dance and sing?

oh those dear departed Pips.
Chorus of harmony
singing us through this life that has its own opinion.
No one asks us - when it's time to pip, pip, cheerio, that's what happens.

Remember those who left in the middle of their life and think that every moment is a gift.

i hear you, Pips. i hear your heavenly beat.

I met Gabriel when we were in our early twenties. We both did business with a group of cowboy pot smugglers that flew the tree-top route from Mexico to Texas. The lead pilot was named Heavy. He called Gabriel "that little gypsy."

Gabriel wasn't actually a gypsy, he was from Transylvania, just like Dracula and Tesla. He reminded me more of Tesla than Dracula.

Gabriel was in a near constant state of invention. I would go to his house and we would talk and smoke. He liked to tear up cigarettes and mix his herb with the tobacco.

He would sit on his deep couch cross legged with his sketchpad on his knee as we talked and he would be inventing things with his pencil. He was an accomplished technical artist and in the course of an afternoon he would come up with designs for machine parts and products and devices, maybe a newly conceived crash helmet or the design for a 3-D stage set where the performers appear to be floating. I don't think it was something he could control. He just had a head full ideas screaming to get out.

Gabriel made his living in ways that were always mysterious to me. He was a consultant to various manufacture and design corporations. I've never really understood what consultants do, but have always enjoyed the company of people who made their livings in mysterious ways.

In 1979, Gabriel became the publisher of my first small book of poetry. We only printed 500 of them but they were released as a signed, numbered edition. We made money.

I lost touch with Gabriel when he moved out of the State. Twenty years went by. I had tried to find him on the internet for several years when one day I received an email with his name on it. He lived in Philly, so one weekend he came to visit doreen and I.

We chewed over old stories and I remembered why he was one of my favorite human beings. He came to visit us several more times in the next few months. We had planned to visit him in Philly. Then suddenly he dropped off the map. I couldn't raise him by phone or email.

A couple of months went by and I received an email from him with an attached picture. It was of him in a hospital bed with half his head shaved and the smile of a surgical scar on his head arching from his temple to behind his ear. He said that the tumor was gone now. A few days later he called on the phone and he sounded like his normal effusive self. That's the last time I heard from him. My emails and my phone calls went unreturned. I knew something was wrong.

Then day before yesterday a friend from Dallas called me with the news. Gabriel was gone.

His brain was his most active organ. He was a fountain of ideas. I guess it's no surprise that it would wear out first.

I loved the man.



here is some of his writing and a picture of him playling the pennywhistle while his dog Babette sings:



http://www.fanstory.com/selectprofilebi ... erid=16303

ah gee, Clay..sorry for the loss of your old friend. You did him right in your piece there. But he's still around thanks to his words and your thoughtful remembering.....He had someplace he had to get to and there was no holding him back....but he'll always live in the hearts of those who love him and is really only a thought away....

Dear LR:

It is the stone shits to lose a friend ( particularly one dying young, like yours), particularly a talented one with whom you share your outlook on the world.

I am very sorry, and as Scoot says, you have remembered him with a touching elegy. Thanks for your link.

Being the irrational ailurophile I am, the passage on your friend's website about "Big Cats" really reached me.

When I was in college, later in graduate school and then a teacher, My friend Kevin Campbell and his memory after we lost close touch, were important to me.

Kevin was a talented fellow-- he was bursting with ideas and imagination, had succeeded in state politics, had become a dentist and practiced in his adopted home town ( I still carry some of his fillings in my mouth), but most of all, had become an accomplished and published poet. Always associated in my mind with San Francisco, he was active in progressive and "little people grassroots" politics.

Among other things he had lost some fingers in a freak accident. He also practiced "pro bono" dentistry at San Quentin.

He died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 41.

Here is my tribute, which hints at some of our wild times together in our 20's:


(paste of poem)


KEVIN

( dentist and poet 1948-1990)


You carry cheap victory
like a mexican smuggler
carries heroin in his tires,
loose around, loose around.

A mad stream of Bull Durham
is papered under your
one remaining thumb.

Sunset burns vespers on the hill,
and you, a prison dentist,
pack silver into
a lifer’s molars.

Sex is a fire drill in your poems.

Under the whore-spangled
Las Vegas sky
you scat desert verses
at a yellowtooth princess.

Yet when we wash you,
put you in the grave,
you are pure, pure.




8/05

What a wonderful poem for this thread Zlatko. I have a hard time reading this thread, because although I don't know Doreen and Lrod's friend that passed away, I too had a dear friend pass away on the 28th of October so I painfully relate. This thread has brought tears to my eyes a few times, which is good because i'm having a hard time crying, believing, accepting that she is gone.
She was only 4 days older than myself, died very suddenly, although she was pretty ill off and on with fibromyalgia and apnea.
It's damn tough......I didn't think she was going to leave.

This is a very beautiful thread, indeed.
It's very sad/sobering, and i'm sorry for your loss Lrod, Doreen.
Thank you for being here.......thank you so much......
H

I am sorry for your loss, Clay and Doreen. What a great person to have known! I've lost a few former classmates and acquaintances to accidents, but never a cherished friend, so I have not had to face down that type of hard loss, at least so far. When I do, I will remember the vision of the ghostly gospel choir, and it will comfort me. Of that, I have no doubt.

hester prynne wrote:I have a hard time reading this thread, because although I don't know Doreen and Lrod's friend that passed away, I too had a dear friend pass away on the ... so I painfully relate. This thread has brought tears to my eyes a few times, which is good because i'm having a hard time crying, believing, accepting that she is gone.

It's damn tough......I didn't think she was going to leave.

This is a very beautiful thread, indeed.

My latest, most loved, Pip has been singing almost seven months now.

sunset sunshine taints the blues
great witness cloud: full and vibrant
proud back-up dancer sequins flash

For Norman:
I thought you might like this version.


my studio eight pips
people I never knew
strangers on the net
who extended the hand of friendship
a silicon based hand but even so I miss them so
not so personal as someone in the carbon based world of life forms
but even so
they were poets more than friends, brothers in arms

sorry about the ramble

That is good. Pax. LR.

I miss Clay. I keep seeing his poems pop up and this one about all his friends dying and Gabriel's death brought back so many memories of the photos we saw which Gabriel sent from the hospital and memories of my last visit with Clay seeing him with his stoma and feeding tube and knowing that now he has joined his Pips..... It was just a bit much for me re-reading this thread from years ago.

It will be a year in February since he's been gone. Believe it or not, I still experience grieving.

I guess I should use this opportunity to move the old threads which end up on the first page into his Memorial Forum at the bottom of the page. Yeah, that will be a good idea.