Poets Madison and Hilbert flank documentary filmmaker Jennifer Abod. Photo by Lorine Parks.

Wonder what goes on at an evening of art, poetry, music, and short films?

Downey artist Roy Anthony Shabla’s Green Salon had all those elements plus vegan food, wine and beer, books of poems for sale and custom printed T-shirts. Tees with pictures of Che Guevara sat next to the Beatles, the Lakers, and Snoopy with horn-rimmed glasses.

The event was held outdoors at the artist’s workshop in an industrial park in neighboring Santa Fe Springs, in a large cement backyard which held the food tables and books by local poets, including Circling Venice and Yearling by Frank Kearns, and The Beauty of Muttliness by Trista Dominqu; and even Catalina Eddy and Persons of Interest by this correspondent.

“We have to help each other,” said Roy. “Imagine living in a world without art.”

Fifty white folding chairs invited the audience to sit and enjoy the short short films and documentary by local filmmakers, which were effectively shown on the brick garage wall.

The evenings are provided free by Shabla, and always feature live music and an open mike.
Complimentary finger food for noshing was offered, and wine and keg beer were free, with a suggested donation and an honor jar.

If “laid back” weren’t such a square term nowadays, it would fit for the mellow evening. A nearly full moon rose in a clear blue sky, a light breeze whispered: a perfect California evening.
“I haven’t lifted a brush in 10 years,” said Roy, as he held open house in his immense storehouse and workroom. “All my paint is flicked or poured or dripped onto the canvas.”

The ceiling of the atelier-warehouse is 20 feet high, and the sliding garage door opens like a carriage entrance, big enough for Roy’s over-size abstract works to be carried in. There are also all-white collages of baseball bats; and a white telephone; huge black cubes with beige and red dice-like spots hovered over the scene.

Music lovers will remember the two mammoth canvases displayed three years ago on the big side stages in the Downey Theatre. Roy’s two abstract canvases with thick 3-D deep-relief drops of blue and green acrylic, titled “Water Music: Blue and Gray 2015,” were each eight feet high and 18 feet long. They evoked the idea of sunlight on water, as the Downey Symphony Orchestra performed Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov and ballet selections from a Swan Lake Suite by Tchaikovsky.

The sun had not quite set when the music began. A casually dressed, mostly youngish crowd strolled around the private lot while musicians Eldorado Collective played a martini-jazz quartet influenced by Herbie Hancock and Santana.

Later, Esmoladera’s Gabriel and Steven Armenta, and other guest musicians, improvised what the untrained ear might call New Age Sound. Pleasant melodies and unexpected chords, not so loud as to impede conversation, a civilized plus at events these days.

The evening’s entertainment was presented by two featured poets familiar to Downey patrons of Poetry Matters evening events over the last six years. Tamara Madison, one of the evening’s featured poets, has read at Rives Mansion and Stay Gallery. She read from her newest book, Moraine (Pearl Editions, 2017), and her poems have bite and vibrancy.

As she read, a nearby evening freight train sounded its mournful whistle, and Tamara went with the flow, as though the music of the train had been scripted into her poems. Poetry in motion.

Donna Hilbert, known for her commitment to social justice, philanthropy and community arts programs, also read, from Gravity (Tebot Bach 2018), an especially poignant poem “Seventh Day of the World Series” which begins, “How about them Dodgers.”

“Twenty years ago,” Donna said, “my husband was killed in a freeway accident, a life-changing event. They said those had been his last words before he was hit.” Her poem concludes, “Your season ended.”

In “Avocado” she writes: “She drove west on 66/ until its end at the ocean,/ ocean where her new world unfurled/ under trees bearing fruit,/ fruit like a fist/ or a mottled green womb. /One taste, avocado, was just/ what she wanted. Good Lord,/she knew she was home.”

Short films were shown, one of them consisting of silent color TV test patterns and sign-offs and one whose dots and slots looked like digitalized bank robbers in ski masks. Then Jennifer Abod presented her groundbreaking and much needed short documentary, “The Passionate Pursuits of Angela Bowen”, about the first black ballet dancer ever to break the racist taboo and appear on the stage in New York.

After she had conquered that barrier, by performing in “Swan Lake,” Angela later came to teach at Cal State Long Beach. As a pioneer Long Beach State Women’s Studies professor, and a pioneer equal rights activist whose reputation reached across the country, she was honored at the first Lavender Graduation in CSLB’s history. Bowen died just one month ago.

Roy Shabla’s over-sized paintings are “probably too big for your living room,” he admitted, “but just right for industrial and corporate spaces.” Fans of the Green Salon can look forward to Saturday, Sept. 22, when Roy will join in an annual world-wide event, “100,000 Poets for Peace,” poets, musicians, and artists around the world in a demonstration/celebration to promote peace, sustainability and justice, and to call for serious social, environmental and political change.

Writing workshops and poetry readings, including an open microphone, will again be backed by musicians and Roy’s customary vegan buffet, with beer, and wine and cheese. Expect Roy’s works in progress to be on display, along with a vast collection of books and chapbooks he has written.