AP photo: Diana Spencer, aged 9
click to enlarge
more on Diana Frances Spencer, Princess of Wales
Friday, August 31, 2007
Dancing with Wolves
Police on the roof of the pier police station; the pedestrian bridge down to the pier bobbing like a marathon. It's hard to imagine a bigger Santa Monica Pier Summer Concert crowd than the one for Los Lobos last night, warm and picture perfect, with a moonrise to the right of stage just in time for the finale and encore.
Strangers dancing with each other from the stage to the amusement park midway; floodlights all over the enormous crowd; whole medley sing-along segments. Los Lobos' has been together over thirty years and their live shows draw from the best the band has offered through that time; the musicianship is jazz-level tight and they are all about making themselves, and everyone else, have a great time. It worked. When music is festive and pure, there's nothing left to say about it; it is its own experience, left under the stars.
It's doubtful in music history if Cinnamon Girl has ever been followed by La Bamba with a Good Lovin'back but that was the encore medley; mostly the audience used the band like a karaoke box and pogoed and danced and sung on their own; the band themselves could rest their vocal chords while the audience took over. Very memorable night from an ensemble that may work outdoors better than any other band from LA, ever.
Strangers dancing with each other from the stage to the amusement park midway; floodlights all over the enormous crowd; whole medley sing-along segments. Los Lobos' has been together over thirty years and their live shows draw from the best the band has offered through that time; the musicianship is jazz-level tight and they are all about making themselves, and everyone else, have a great time. It worked. When music is festive and pure, there's nothing left to say about it; it is its own experience, left under the stars.
It's doubtful in music history if Cinnamon Girl has ever been followed by La Bamba with a Good Lovin'back but that was the encore medley; mostly the audience used the band like a karaoke box and pogoed and danced and sung on their own; the band themselves could rest their vocal chords while the audience took over. Very memorable night from an ensemble that may work outdoors better than any other band from LA, ever.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Up the Coast
Ansel Adams, Robinson Jeffers (The Big Sur Coast: Sierra Club, 1965)
click photo to enlarge
more on Robinson Jeffers
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
around 'dena
~
Visit to the Norton Simon after many years. Good lord, the first room alone must have $300 million worth of paintings.
Always have favored the Norton Simon's salon-style hangings, rather than those faux-didactic follow-our-catalog programs that LACMA and sometimes the Hammer too often impose on their museum-goers. Nothing more I hate in a museum than being ushered through a specific sequence of rooms because a curator wants to impose his little brochure onto your experience of the art.
The paintings that were a delight from thirty years ago now are personal icons.
Saw a superb documentary tonight: No End in Sight, playing (but not for long) at either the Royal or the Academy---whichever is more dilapidated of the two. Beyond the Vulcans, the longish doc especially faults L. Paul Bremer.
It turns out that there are still good patty melts at Burger Continental after all these years.
~
Visit to the Norton Simon after many years. Good lord, the first room alone must have $300 million worth of paintings.
Always have favored the Norton Simon's salon-style hangings, rather than those faux-didactic follow-our-catalog programs that LACMA and sometimes the Hammer too often impose on their museum-goers. Nothing more I hate in a museum than being ushered through a specific sequence of rooms because a curator wants to impose his little brochure onto your experience of the art.
The paintings that were a delight from thirty years ago now are personal icons.
° ° ° ° °
Saw a superb documentary tonight: No End in Sight, playing (but not for long) at either the Royal or the Academy---whichever is more dilapidated of the two. Beyond the Vulcans, the longish doc especially faults L. Paul Bremer.
° ° ° ° °
It turns out that there are still good patty melts at Burger Continental after all these years.
~
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Monday, August 27, 2007
Prouts
~
When I was 29-33 I used to spend at least three days a year (minimum stay) and often much longer at this place: the Black Point Inn. Almost always at this time of year, precisely.
My parents passed away when I was 34 and I stopped taking long summer breaks in Maine. Those long summer breaks had largely been breaks from the soft pressure of ceaselessly caring for them during their declining years; during these breaks, relatives took over (and a couple of times, I went in winter, before the holidays---but not to the Inn, which back then used to close in mid-October, though I see now it is open until New Year's---global warming?) One day a few years later, however, LisaExit and I, who also visited Maine three or four times in addition to Mammoth (which had become our summer destination of choice), drove up to the place with the intent to stay but decided not to, because the crowd in the lobby on our arrival was too corporate for our taste. I don't know what the crowd is like there now, but I do know that all over America, grand hotels and resorts began to surrender some of their gentility to something more accommodating of corporate clientele in the nineties. (In recent years, we've had good luck at Oakland's Claremont, though).
Part of the allure of the Black Point Inn for me was the proximity to Winslow Homer's studio. Around the cliff walk of Prouts Neck---which I must admit is, despite its proximity to Portland, a rather remote and rarefied part of Maine---are the vistas of Homer's best-known paintings. I studied Homer quite a bit in college, and that was the original draw of Prouts for me. (A grand-niece of his named Doris Homer still lived on Prouts in those years, and she always had good stories, usually involving Homer's prodigious consumption of alcohol).
The first time I ever took that cliff walk, I was in a small group led by the Inn's owners' son, who was eleven. He knew even at that age that he wanted to take over the Inn someday. And it is fun to think that that eleven-year-old who led a tour of adults so competently is now thirty-two. I'm quite curious as to what happened to him...
The last summer I went, another Inn just off the Neck, The Atlantic House, was demolished. That one was 150 years old. It belonged to the Giamatti family---that's the family of A. Bartlett Giamatti, the legendary and tragically short-tenured Commissioner of Baseball and fabled professor of Comparative Literature at Yale. Everyone knows they lost Bart in 1989 at a time when he seemed poised to save baseball from the ruin it still languishes in today, but far fewer know that the family lost The Atlantic House around the same time.
[I've written a lot about all of these places, especially of the cliff walk and of Homer's studio, in my novel A Summer Away.]
Note: don't use an apostrophe for Finnegans Wake, and don't use one for Prouts Neck. It simply isn't done by people who know.
Note two: since forever the Claremont has been saying it's in Berkeley, but it's really in Oakland if you check the city limits.
Note three: Lynn and Stephanie and I visited the Ritz Carlton Huntington grounds on Saturday---vurrry sleepy.
~
When I was 29-33 I used to spend at least three days a year (minimum stay) and often much longer at this place: the Black Point Inn. Almost always at this time of year, precisely.
My parents passed away when I was 34 and I stopped taking long summer breaks in Maine. Those long summer breaks had largely been breaks from the soft pressure of ceaselessly caring for them during their declining years; during these breaks, relatives took over (and a couple of times, I went in winter, before the holidays---but not to the Inn, which back then used to close in mid-October, though I see now it is open until New Year's---global warming?) One day a few years later, however, LisaExit and I, who also visited Maine three or four times in addition to Mammoth (which had become our summer destination of choice), drove up to the place with the intent to stay but decided not to, because the crowd in the lobby on our arrival was too corporate for our taste. I don't know what the crowd is like there now, but I do know that all over America, grand hotels and resorts began to surrender some of their gentility to something more accommodating of corporate clientele in the nineties. (In recent years, we've had good luck at Oakland's Claremont, though).
Part of the allure of the Black Point Inn for me was the proximity to Winslow Homer's studio. Around the cliff walk of Prouts Neck---which I must admit is, despite its proximity to Portland, a rather remote and rarefied part of Maine---are the vistas of Homer's best-known paintings. I studied Homer quite a bit in college, and that was the original draw of Prouts for me. (A grand-niece of his named Doris Homer still lived on Prouts in those years, and she always had good stories, usually involving Homer's prodigious consumption of alcohol).
The first time I ever took that cliff walk, I was in a small group led by the Inn's owners' son, who was eleven. He knew even at that age that he wanted to take over the Inn someday. And it is fun to think that that eleven-year-old who led a tour of adults so competently is now thirty-two. I'm quite curious as to what happened to him...
The last summer I went, another Inn just off the Neck, The Atlantic House, was demolished. That one was 150 years old. It belonged to the Giamatti family---that's the family of A. Bartlett Giamatti, the legendary and tragically short-tenured Commissioner of Baseball and fabled professor of Comparative Literature at Yale. Everyone knows they lost Bart in 1989 at a time when he seemed poised to save baseball from the ruin it still languishes in today, but far fewer know that the family lost The Atlantic House around the same time.
[I've written a lot about all of these places, especially of the cliff walk and of Homer's studio, in my novel A Summer Away.]
Note: don't use an apostrophe for Finnegans Wake, and don't use one for Prouts Neck. It simply isn't done by people who know.
Note two: since forever the Claremont has been saying it's in Berkeley, but it's really in Oakland if you check the city limits.
Note three: Lynn and Stephanie and I visited the Ritz Carlton Huntington grounds on Saturday---vurrry sleepy.
~
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Carousel redux
~
I see that my poem Santa Monica Carousel made it in the Writer's Resource Center's weekly poetry roundup, Poetry Across the Web.
It's likely not entirely wise to say too much about one's own poems---why tinker with anyone else's interpretation?---but I think I can safely skirt some issues with this one that might make it a bit richer for any reader. Readers in the past---this poem has been around for a few years, and was written over a period longer than a decade---have liked the poem a lot but have not been able to put a finger on why. It's also Madamina's favorite poem of mine, and it's dedicated to her.
I first got some of the ideas to write a poem incorporating both childhood imagery and more adult sexual imagery from a Francis Bacon exhibition that came to LA in 1988. I spent many days at that particular exhibition, and was overwhelmed by Bacon's canvasses in a way that I hadn't previously been overwhelmed by canvasses in my life.
In Bacon, there are often bits of both carnival atmosphere and carnal relations, and not pretty visions of either. The poem doesn't prettify Bacon, but it does use the double-edged imagery of Bacon as a point of departure for something hopefully better. Bacon's figures are filled with despair and even mayhem---I wanted to take the old story of love and pain and make it more redemptive than Bacon does it.
Thus, the first two lines start off soaring. They are not only carousel imagery but an obvious allusion to Pegasus, who is not only a flying horse but the horse at the service of poets. Poetry itself is like this---it leaves the pole, it flies, it's magic. "Quick as a bullet in a dream" came to me literally, in a dream---wow, that was fast!---but it also recalls for me a chilling line from Melville's great poem Shiloh; a Requiem---"what like a bullet can undeceive"---which anticipates the "teatime burial" mentioned later. The trumpet---well, if you go to the races, you know what gets the race going...but in the sky, a trumpet is also a harbinger of both the last judgment and the paradise to come.
"Two in puddles" &c. is pure Bacon---often when Bacon represents sex the figures are fully fluid, disappearing into each other in a languid way. But the next line is more fantasy-oriented, tropics, etc.; Pegasus/the carousel horse is already in the tropics even after a few seconds of flight, and wherever he is, there is down there on earth something sexual going on...how are we to judge it?
What's the point of the death-imagery, the Liebestod, the bullet and the teatime burial? Death is a backdrop in the poem; it's the age-old poet admonition: life is short, carpe diem. But we can't leave it there; it's already been said. "Our fictive shadow"---the horse and rider's---well, this is fantasy, but it is the fantasy by which we escape---it's real...
The horse becomes real in the final stanza, no longer floating as a dream, but enduring the real things that horses endure---the spurs, the whipping---yes, more sexual images also. White and pasty silhouettes---I saw these a lot growing up, indeed they were in my home, and the homes of nearly all my friends---they were portraits of us that belonged to our mothers; they were our mother's ideas of who we were and how we should live, daintily, in a Victorian world. So the final admonistion is to let what belongs to mom hang in the mother's sky---your mother's sky is not the sky Pegasus, nor you, should fly in; fly in your own magical sky, not the one in which the pasty silhouettes from the past are hung. The horse leaves its pole; leave your mother's sky.
I finished this poem in 2000 and gave it to Lynn. She considers it hers; she has a special relationship to it; indeed, even though I started it before I met her, I didn't have all the pieces in place until after I had known her for a few years. It's her poem, in that way that you can start writing something even before you know who you are writing it for; I only began it all those years ago; her life finished it for me, years and years later.
Finally---Santa Monica Carousel? Lynn lived in Santa Monica for years, and for everyone who lives there, the Carousel is a personal icon. Everyone loves the Carousel. I posted the poem after Stephanie and I popped into see the Carousel, the night of the Patti Smith concert. (Patti Smith---a woman who works the exact same issues as those in this poem). Lynn met us there later; the poem went up here the next day. But as I said, I began it in 1988 and only finished it in 2000.
It's one of my favorites as well. But I think Hermosa might be my own personal favorite poem.
I see that my poem Santa Monica Carousel made it in the Writer's Resource Center's weekly poetry roundup, Poetry Across the Web.
° ° ° ° °
It's likely not entirely wise to say too much about one's own poems---why tinker with anyone else's interpretation?---but I think I can safely skirt some issues with this one that might make it a bit richer for any reader. Readers in the past---this poem has been around for a few years, and was written over a period longer than a decade---have liked the poem a lot but have not been able to put a finger on why. It's also Madamina's favorite poem of mine, and it's dedicated to her.
° ° ° ° °
I first got some of the ideas to write a poem incorporating both childhood imagery and more adult sexual imagery from a Francis Bacon exhibition that came to LA in 1988. I spent many days at that particular exhibition, and was overwhelmed by Bacon's canvasses in a way that I hadn't previously been overwhelmed by canvasses in my life.
In Bacon, there are often bits of both carnival atmosphere and carnal relations, and not pretty visions of either. The poem doesn't prettify Bacon, but it does use the double-edged imagery of Bacon as a point of departure for something hopefully better. Bacon's figures are filled with despair and even mayhem---I wanted to take the old story of love and pain and make it more redemptive than Bacon does it.
° ° ° ° °
Thus, the first two lines start off soaring. They are not only carousel imagery but an obvious allusion to Pegasus, who is not only a flying horse but the horse at the service of poets. Poetry itself is like this---it leaves the pole, it flies, it's magic. "Quick as a bullet in a dream" came to me literally, in a dream---wow, that was fast!---but it also recalls for me a chilling line from Melville's great poem Shiloh; a Requiem---"what like a bullet can undeceive"---which anticipates the "teatime burial" mentioned later. The trumpet---well, if you go to the races, you know what gets the race going...but in the sky, a trumpet is also a harbinger of both the last judgment and the paradise to come.
"Two in puddles" &c. is pure Bacon---often when Bacon represents sex the figures are fully fluid, disappearing into each other in a languid way. But the next line is more fantasy-oriented, tropics, etc.; Pegasus/the carousel horse is already in the tropics even after a few seconds of flight, and wherever he is, there is down there on earth something sexual going on...how are we to judge it?
What's the point of the death-imagery, the Liebestod, the bullet and the teatime burial? Death is a backdrop in the poem; it's the age-old poet admonition: life is short, carpe diem. But we can't leave it there; it's already been said. "Our fictive shadow"---the horse and rider's---well, this is fantasy, but it is the fantasy by which we escape---it's real...
The horse becomes real in the final stanza, no longer floating as a dream, but enduring the real things that horses endure---the spurs, the whipping---yes, more sexual images also. White and pasty silhouettes---I saw these a lot growing up, indeed they were in my home, and the homes of nearly all my friends---they were portraits of us that belonged to our mothers; they were our mother's ideas of who we were and how we should live, daintily, in a Victorian world. So the final admonistion is to let what belongs to mom hang in the mother's sky---your mother's sky is not the sky Pegasus, nor you, should fly in; fly in your own magical sky, not the one in which the pasty silhouettes from the past are hung. The horse leaves its pole; leave your mother's sky.
I finished this poem in 2000 and gave it to Lynn. She considers it hers; she has a special relationship to it; indeed, even though I started it before I met her, I didn't have all the pieces in place until after I had known her for a few years. It's her poem, in that way that you can start writing something even before you know who you are writing it for; I only began it all those years ago; her life finished it for me, years and years later.
° ° ° ° °
Finally---Santa Monica Carousel? Lynn lived in Santa Monica for years, and for everyone who lives there, the Carousel is a personal icon. Everyone loves the Carousel. I posted the poem after Stephanie and I popped into see the Carousel, the night of the Patti Smith concert. (Patti Smith---a woman who works the exact same issues as those in this poem). Lynn met us there later; the poem went up here the next day. But as I said, I began it in 1988 and only finished it in 2000.
It's one of my favorites as well. But I think Hermosa might be my own personal favorite poem.
Time out for the Mayor
~
Time out here for a minute. Let me tell you about there. I am really enjoying my gig at MayorSam these days.
Some of you may recall that I used to edit an old blog with a damn good profile. MayorSam now gets more readers a day than my old blog got.
I'm a scribe at MayorSam, not an editor. Which makes a world of difference for me; I don't have to police anything, cut anything, insist on anything; I just offer my take and walk away until the next time.
Sure, I have a great relationship with the Mayor; sure, I'll give him my ear when I see fit. But that site is largely populated by people who are precisely likewise. We're all adults.
I imagine that the site itself might benefit from having around a peripheral guy who's been an editor of a decent sized blog but who now isn't. I know first hand what kinds of things cause an editor problems, and am probably even more deferential to the Mayor than all the other scribes there as a result. I have a good understanding I think of what works best for the blog, and bring a respect to the editor's role that most bloggers---who admittedly aren't worth a damn unless they have damn healthy egos---are reticent to acknowledge.
Though I haven't always been a dependable contributor at the site, that's changed lately. In truth, I've been involved in an arm's-length way in one way or another with that blog almost from the very beginning, three years ago. These days I look at the site and just jump in whenever I think it might be beneficial to. As does nearly everyone else. There's generally an amiable all-for-one anarchy at the site that reminds me of the best days of the old blog.
If you think my old blog had drama, you should see what has gone on behind the scenes at MayorSam over the years. But it rolls with it all in a far more productive way. An editor is also a manager, and what a difference not to be the guy managing all that. The Mayor's own managerial style is, I assure you, way more entertaining than mine; let's just say he's not as interested in trying to please everybody as I was...and he has a little more ability to control any problems...
There are other blogs around town that are prettier, and that are better at providing general content. But hands down, when it comes to local politics, MayorSam is the City's most important blog; nobody else comes close. It's so important, in fact, that many news scribes especially at the fishwrap of record don't like to acknowledge it at all, even as they're crawling all over it to cherry-pick it for their next story.
The petty types both in print and even in the blogosphere know who they may potentially lose eyeballs to, and elect not to point their readers to MayorSam, even though we at the blog point our readers to these other sites and papers dozens of times every day. But also rest assured that there are plenty of scribes and editors elsewhere who actually work with the writers at MayorSam, and many contributors and even some commenters there have also contributed to the City's op-ed pages fairly dependably.
In general, and as nearly every local editor around here will tell you, there is an abundant amount of horrifying political news in this City, and not nearly enough people who know how to report it. The MayorSam site really helps plug the gaps.
The local news people at the fishwrap of record will come around, I think. They will have to: I even heard recently that the Times's subscriber base is heavily padded, and may even be as low as 600,000 right now. You can bet when someone who actually cares starts calling the shots at the Times, she'll demand accuracy in counting, and think of a better way for print to meet blog without fearing losing readers.
I've put back a link on the sidebar here to my MayorSam A Guy in LA column at the site. When you're feeling a sense of civitas, or a hankering for gossip, welling within, give it a look.
~
Time out here for a minute. Let me tell you about there. I am really enjoying my gig at MayorSam these days.
Some of you may recall that I used to edit an old blog with a damn good profile. MayorSam now gets more readers a day than my old blog got.
° ° ° ° °
I'm a scribe at MayorSam, not an editor. Which makes a world of difference for me; I don't have to police anything, cut anything, insist on anything; I just offer my take and walk away until the next time.
Sure, I have a great relationship with the Mayor; sure, I'll give him my ear when I see fit. But that site is largely populated by people who are precisely likewise. We're all adults.
° ° ° ° °
I imagine that the site itself might benefit from having around a peripheral guy who's been an editor of a decent sized blog but who now isn't. I know first hand what kinds of things cause an editor problems, and am probably even more deferential to the Mayor than all the other scribes there as a result. I have a good understanding I think of what works best for the blog, and bring a respect to the editor's role that most bloggers---who admittedly aren't worth a damn unless they have damn healthy egos---are reticent to acknowledge.
Though I haven't always been a dependable contributor at the site, that's changed lately. In truth, I've been involved in an arm's-length way in one way or another with that blog almost from the very beginning, three years ago. These days I look at the site and just jump in whenever I think it might be beneficial to. As does nearly everyone else. There's generally an amiable all-for-one anarchy at the site that reminds me of the best days of the old blog.
° ° ° ° °
If you think my old blog had drama, you should see what has gone on behind the scenes at MayorSam over the years. But it rolls with it all in a far more productive way. An editor is also a manager, and what a difference not to be the guy managing all that. The Mayor's own managerial style is, I assure you, way more entertaining than mine; let's just say he's not as interested in trying to please everybody as I was...and he has a little more ability to control any problems...
° ° ° ° °
There are other blogs around town that are prettier, and that are better at providing general content. But hands down, when it comes to local politics, MayorSam is the City's most important blog; nobody else comes close. It's so important, in fact, that many news scribes especially at the fishwrap of record don't like to acknowledge it at all, even as they're crawling all over it to cherry-pick it for their next story.
The petty types both in print and even in the blogosphere know who they may potentially lose eyeballs to, and elect not to point their readers to MayorSam, even though we at the blog point our readers to these other sites and papers dozens of times every day. But also rest assured that there are plenty of scribes and editors elsewhere who actually work with the writers at MayorSam, and many contributors and even some commenters there have also contributed to the City's op-ed pages fairly dependably.
° ° ° ° °
In general, and as nearly every local editor around here will tell you, there is an abundant amount of horrifying political news in this City, and not nearly enough people who know how to report it. The MayorSam site really helps plug the gaps.
The local news people at the fishwrap of record will come around, I think. They will have to: I even heard recently that the Times's subscriber base is heavily padded, and may even be as low as 600,000 right now. You can bet when someone who actually cares starts calling the shots at the Times, she'll demand accuracy in counting, and think of a better way for print to meet blog without fearing losing readers.
I've put back a link on the sidebar here to my MayorSam A Guy in LA column at the site. When you're feeling a sense of civitas, or a hankering for gossip, welling within, give it a look.
~
Friday, August 24, 2007
Wonderings
~
Someone says she may kiss me this freezing summer.
I wonder if she has a good memory for names of fictional characters?
LisaExit read a New Yorker article and says I may have Asperger Syndrome. (Indeed, I was singing The Elements Song to myself on the way to the pool Wednesday; it's been in my head since I was thirteen and used it to teach myself the periodic table).
I wonder if it just seems that way because I enormously involve myself very deeply with the lives of people I am closest to---and they don't seem to have a clue about mine, or care to?
Or maybe mythologizing about my memory simply gives those nearest me license to not pay attention to me? They can always later claim that it's of course because my memory is better than theirs.
I wonder is Asperger's Syndrome is really an excuse people can plead when they are disinterested in something or someone and their own memory fails.
I wonder if Stephanie made it to the Hammer Bash. I had intended to go and would have liked to, but I was busy facilitating a big evening for some others as I am often called to do.
~
Someone says she may kiss me this freezing summer.
I wonder if she has a good memory for names of fictional characters?
° ° ° ° °
LisaExit read a New Yorker article and says I may have Asperger Syndrome. (Indeed, I was singing The Elements Song to myself on the way to the pool Wednesday; it's been in my head since I was thirteen and used it to teach myself the periodic table).
I wonder if it just seems that way because I enormously involve myself very deeply with the lives of people I am closest to---and they don't seem to have a clue about mine, or care to?
° ° ° ° °
Or maybe mythologizing about my memory simply gives those nearest me license to not pay attention to me? They can always later claim that it's of course because my memory is better than theirs.
I wonder is Asperger's Syndrome is really an excuse people can plead when they are disinterested in something or someone and their own memory fails.
° ° ° ° °
I wonder if Stephanie made it to the Hammer Bash. I had intended to go and would have liked to, but I was busy facilitating a big evening for some others as I am often called to do.
~
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Nothing 11:06ixy either
~
Very busy this past 24, sorry. But if you want to read something Joseph-y and current, click through and here you go.
~
Very busy this past 24, sorry. But if you want to read something Joseph-y and current, click through and here you go.
~
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Kyrie
obverse: postcard, Keeping the Tree Up, JM to LS, 6.30.97
reverse: postcard, Keeping the Tree Up, JM to LS, 6.30.97
written while listening to Frank Martin kyrie
postcard in situ: past ten years right panel door of GE 19.7 cu. ft. refrigerator
click images to enlarge
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
labyrinthine
~
Almost always before I take the machina in for brake pads, I do a labyrinth. Something different, though, this morning: instead of contemplating a situation or a future, I contemplated Phoebe, one of the main characters of my novel. Different, because contemplating a character starts off mostly as contemplating a past rather than a future.
Yet even the labyrinth is at bottom a desiring-machine, which implies a future---even if it's a character's. And so your mind flips back and forth as the switchbacks turn: Phoebe, and the people who make Phoebe, what future will they have? what future do you have with them? what future do the characters who meet the character Phoebe have? Soon it is all very labyrinthine...a classic midgame Fischer exchange, like a weak bishop for three key pawns...and it works in the reverse way of a labyrinth, where you typically contemplate a future first, then the path to it next, and drawing from the past in the end; with a fictional character, you are contemplating a past first, a future second, and the path between the two last of all.
I met a Phoebe last night. "Our parents wanted Greek names with P's" she said (never mind that Φ is a different Greek letter than Π...). I said, well, I hope there's no Penelope...whoops...there was. I asked her if she was from New England, where there are a surfeit of Phoebes, and she said, "Oh, no..." as snobbily as though a Manhattanite or a San Franciscan...it turned out she was from...
...Buffalo...
I don't know that I was Φussy for Φoebe; but then again, given the gaffe, nor should she have been for me. She started quizzing me on how well I knew the Titan Phoebe---and then, when I had not given enough, she assured me that she had indeed met people who knew their Greek mythology. It felt like Jeopardy!
Wikipedia is not bad on Phoebe, but maybe too like the kind of mythological referencing that makes your head ache. Right here, however, I happen to have an Oxford Classical Dictionary at the ready...something I pulled from the estate of a ruined Jesuit. Absent the parenthetical references, it says...
Almost always before I take the machina in for brake pads, I do a labyrinth. Something different, though, this morning: instead of contemplating a situation or a future, I contemplated Phoebe, one of the main characters of my novel. Different, because contemplating a character starts off mostly as contemplating a past rather than a future.
Yet even the labyrinth is at bottom a desiring-machine, which implies a future---even if it's a character's. And so your mind flips back and forth as the switchbacks turn: Phoebe, and the people who make Phoebe, what future will they have? what future do you have with them? what future do the characters who meet the character Phoebe have? Soon it is all very labyrinthine...a classic midgame Fischer exchange, like a weak bishop for three key pawns...and it works in the reverse way of a labyrinth, where you typically contemplate a future first, then the path to it next, and drawing from the past in the end; with a fictional character, you are contemplating a past first, a future second, and the path between the two last of all.
° ° ° ° °
I met a Phoebe last night. "Our parents wanted Greek names with P's" she said (never mind that Φ is a different Greek letter than Π...). I said, well, I hope there's no Penelope...whoops...there was. I asked her if she was from New England, where there are a surfeit of Phoebes, and she said, "Oh, no..." as snobbily as though a Manhattanite or a San Franciscan...it turned out she was from...
...Buffalo...
I don't know that I was Φussy for Φoebe; but then again, given the gaffe, nor should she have been for me. She started quizzing me on how well I knew the Titan Phoebe---and then, when I had not given enough, she assured me that she had indeed met people who knew their Greek mythology. It felt like Jeopardy!
° ° ° ° °
Wikipedia is not bad on Phoebe, but maybe too like the kind of mythological referencing that makes your head ache. Right here, however, I happen to have an Oxford Classical Dictionary at the ready...something I pulled from the estate of a ruined Jesuit. Absent the parenthetical references, it says...
Titaness, daughter of Heaven and Earth; wife of Coeus and mother of Leto. She is thus grandmother of Apollo (Phoebus) and Artemis. But her name, 'the bright one', is not infrequently used for the Moon, though never in an early author; and therefore also for Artemis and Diana, as identical with the Moon. Of several other mythological figures who bear this name, the only well-known one is a daughter of Leucippus. The scholar Strozniana on Germanicus says Hesiod called one of the Heliades Phoebe.
Les amis des mes amis...
~
...sont mes amis. It was hot yesterday. How hot? The adult lap lanes at Riverside: all taken.
Two girls in the shallow end: one was Lisa Exit; the other, Emmanuelle, sporting a wide-brim floppy in the pool.
Emmanuelle informs: Matt's book is done! (And so is McCain!)
L'Ami de mon amie (rendered Boyfriends and Girlfriends in this unlikely language) is a cute little Rohmer film, if you haven't seen it.
Well, Madamina found the headline funny, anyway: "Ice cream anti-social surprise surprise: the limousine liberal who rides the bus shows up"...
~
...sont mes amis. It was hot yesterday. How hot? The adult lap lanes at Riverside: all taken.
° ° ° ° °
Two girls in the shallow end: one was Lisa Exit; the other, Emmanuelle, sporting a wide-brim floppy in the pool.
° ° ° ° °
Emmanuelle informs: Matt's book is done! (And so is McCain!)
° ° ° ° °
L'Ami de mon amie (rendered Boyfriends and Girlfriends in this unlikely language) is a cute little Rohmer film, if you haven't seen it.
° ° ° ° °
Well, Madamina found the headline funny, anyway: "Ice cream anti-social surprise surprise: the limousine liberal who rides the bus shows up"...
~
Monday, August 20, 2007
a l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur
dans le temps
"Albertine is not Albert. Albertine can be only one man---the man who cannot escape himself, who knows other people only in himself, and who can reveal himself only if he merges with others---with men as well as women. This man is a flower in a bunch of amaranths, a gull in a flock of birds, a Gomorrhean, a budding girl. When he says so, he is telling the truth. Who is this man? The narrator."
---Julia Kristeva, Time & Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature (New York: Columbia University Press; 1996), p. 82-3
click to enlarge
~
Sunday, August 19, 2007
The new downtown
~
Gelato under a sky barely breaking with heat: Piccomolo, Weller Court, Little Tokyo. The fringe of a parade route in the middle of a festival that isn't raucous yet. Enough chairs for enough people, a dozen, maybe with a lagniappe or two.
People I know and I've read but who are also my increasingly favorite kind of people: strangers. A few I've met before though; yet I've known the voices of nearly all of them; and voices say very much, as does my own I'm sure. Others are readers---others are scribes sworn to secrecy---others are people who love talking off the record and frequently do.
Ed says, "I was wondering how it would be an 'ice-cream anti-social', until Mailander showed up." That's about as much as I've laughed all weekend.
The pistachio looks too green---which is our usual complaint about the stuff. So it's cherry-chocolate for me, utterly great cherry-chocolate at that. Later, the establishment springs for iced coffees---that was a gesture certainly worthy of a plug. Sitting in the shade all afternoon, talking like Europe, imagining ---but wait---all this continental lounging and bavader is taking place in Downtown Los Angeles? In Little Tokyo?
Thinking of Joe Scott, who was born within a few feet of this place (really) almost fourscoure ago; sometimes we have lunch down here. Joe: there's gelato in Little Tokyo; good gelato too---it may even hone in on the snow-cones!
And this is ultimately where Downtown is at right now: Joe Scott is seventysomething, Eric Richardson is twentysomething, you're just as likely to run into one as the other down here, and just as likely to hear something impassioned and telling from both, especially if you're at an age somewhere in between and can straddle generations a bit. There are a kaleidescope of blogs. There is the Downtown News but also the Garment & Citizen; there are more flavors of lofts than of gelato, even than of snow cones, even within a well-struck sand wedge of Oomasa alone.
There are also a thousand new units a year, more---units everywhere. Everyone has a favorite building, a best buy, an inside tip, a place that hasn't been subjected to the same stresses as the other places yet.
Nobody knows what the outcome will be---it's not Manhattan, that's for sure. But it's not Tokyo either. It is shaping up in a way that takes on more natives than either, filling up with natives in fact, and putting its own wax seal on them, uniquely sunshiney, uniquely Angeleno. It doesn't need to be compared to anyplace else; it is what it is.
Gelato under a sky barely breaking with heat: Piccomolo, Weller Court, Little Tokyo. The fringe of a parade route in the middle of a festival that isn't raucous yet. Enough chairs for enough people, a dozen, maybe with a lagniappe or two.
People I know and I've read but who are also my increasingly favorite kind of people: strangers. A few I've met before though; yet I've known the voices of nearly all of them; and voices say very much, as does my own I'm sure. Others are readers---others are scribes sworn to secrecy---others are people who love talking off the record and frequently do.
Ed says, "I was wondering how it would be an 'ice-cream anti-social', until Mailander showed up." That's about as much as I've laughed all weekend.
The pistachio looks too green---which is our usual complaint about the stuff. So it's cherry-chocolate for me, utterly great cherry-chocolate at that. Later, the establishment springs for iced coffees---that was a gesture certainly worthy of a plug. Sitting in the shade all afternoon, talking like Europe, imagining ---but wait---all this continental lounging and bavader is taking place in Downtown Los Angeles? In Little Tokyo?
Thinking of Joe Scott, who was born within a few feet of this place (really) almost fourscoure ago; sometimes we have lunch down here. Joe: there's gelato in Little Tokyo; good gelato too---it may even hone in on the snow-cones!
And this is ultimately where Downtown is at right now: Joe Scott is seventysomething, Eric Richardson is twentysomething, you're just as likely to run into one as the other down here, and just as likely to hear something impassioned and telling from both, especially if you're at an age somewhere in between and can straddle generations a bit. There are a kaleidescope of blogs. There is the Downtown News but also the Garment & Citizen; there are more flavors of lofts than of gelato, even than of snow cones, even within a well-struck sand wedge of Oomasa alone.
There are also a thousand new units a year, more---units everywhere. Everyone has a favorite building, a best buy, an inside tip, a place that hasn't been subjected to the same stresses as the other places yet.
Nobody knows what the outcome will be---it's not Manhattan, that's for sure. But it's not Tokyo either. It is shaping up in a way that takes on more natives than either, filling up with natives in fact, and putting its own wax seal on them, uniquely sunshiney, uniquely Angeleno. It doesn't need to be compared to anyplace else; it is what it is.
Beyond the Big Bang
Lisa Exit, ever with an eye to fitness, recommends hiking up to the Observatory; Madamina Lynn easily buys in. I'm thinking we'll walk up Vermont, a nice slow rise, but no; Ms. Exit's base camp is the park just south of the Greek, and the trail starts off with three very steep switchbacks, and nobody else is going up it at this hot hour, though many are descending. It's 10:30 a.m., one of the hottest days of the year. The girls move on, wait up for me, move on again.
The talk on the ascent is mostly a debate on the merits of Bikram yoga---I'm suspicious, especially of something that costs $17 a session but is virtually free the first week, and also virtually unlimited over three months if you buy $300 worth. That sounds more like marketing, like price-point precision than it does wellness.
At one point on the trail, we see an Asian guy hanging by his arms from a tree. Madamina says, "There you go, a new fitness movement, maybe you can get in his class."
At the top of the hill, the Observatory is open. On the grounds, I like the rings of the planet orbits, die-cut into the new concrete. It reminds me of Lita Albuquerque's constellation map at the Cathedral---there's something comforting in having the heavens under foot.
Hiking up beats the bus ride fee; you just walk in. It's our first visit since the re-opening, and we're all completely pleased. The familiar (in my case, from childhood) cool space, the Foucault Pendulum sweeping away, the new exhibits mercifully displacing the old shopworn ones (remember that trashy photo of the woman hit in the leg by a meteor?) I particularly warmed up to the elements display.
The words "Big Bang" appear on various exhibits, and I let the girls know that there is now a significant branch of scientific theory that opposes the Big Bang. But that's the beauty of the Observatory---it's ever fated to be a part of the past its telescopes and exhibits peer into; it's always frozen in a time that's just barely not this one; even when it's freshly scrubbed.
The girls want to see the food venue---Puckian, and there are a bunch of Red Hats there---and they agree it's a worthwhile destination itself, maybe for coffee after a hike. Then the trip back down, down into Vermont Canyon, back into real time. From various ridges, we examine the fire damage to the south side of the Park, and everything unburned still seems like a tinderbox ready to catch. But with the crowning monument's purpose sampled---nothing short of acquainting us with the white-hot explosions and coolings and crushings and formations of universe itself---that only feels appropriate.
The talk on the ascent is mostly a debate on the merits of Bikram yoga---I'm suspicious, especially of something that costs $17 a session but is virtually free the first week, and also virtually unlimited over three months if you buy $300 worth. That sounds more like marketing, like price-point precision than it does wellness.
At one point on the trail, we see an Asian guy hanging by his arms from a tree. Madamina says, "There you go, a new fitness movement, maybe you can get in his class."
At the top of the hill, the Observatory is open. On the grounds, I like the rings of the planet orbits, die-cut into the new concrete. It reminds me of Lita Albuquerque's constellation map at the Cathedral---there's something comforting in having the heavens under foot.
Hiking up beats the bus ride fee; you just walk in. It's our first visit since the re-opening, and we're all completely pleased. The familiar (in my case, from childhood) cool space, the Foucault Pendulum sweeping away, the new exhibits mercifully displacing the old shopworn ones (remember that trashy photo of the woman hit in the leg by a meteor?) I particularly warmed up to the elements display.
The words "Big Bang" appear on various exhibits, and I let the girls know that there is now a significant branch of scientific theory that opposes the Big Bang. But that's the beauty of the Observatory---it's ever fated to be a part of the past its telescopes and exhibits peer into; it's always frozen in a time that's just barely not this one; even when it's freshly scrubbed.
The girls want to see the food venue---Puckian, and there are a bunch of Red Hats there---and they agree it's a worthwhile destination itself, maybe for coffee after a hike. Then the trip back down, down into Vermont Canyon, back into real time. From various ridges, we examine the fire damage to the south side of the Park, and everything unburned still seems like a tinderbox ready to catch. But with the crowning monument's purpose sampled---nothing short of acquainting us with the white-hot explosions and coolings and crushings and formations of universe itself---that only feels appropriate.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Cave Canem
Get Sirius.
Dog Days: "Popularly believed to be an evil time 'when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies' - Brady’s Clavis Calendarium, 1813."
Sirius:
Cave canem?The name of this star comes from the Latin Sīrius, from Greek Σείριος (Seirios, "glowing" or "scorcher"). As the major star of the "Big Dog" constellation, it is often called the "Dog Star".
The Latin name for this star is Canicula ("little dog") and in Arabic: الشعرى aš-ši‘rā in Islamic astronomy, from which the alternate name Al Shira derives. In Sanskrit, it is known as Mrgavyadha ("deer hunter") or Lubdhaka ("hunter"). As Mrgavyadha, the star represents Shiva. In Chinese the star is known as star of celestial wolf (Chinese and Japanese: 天狼; Korean: 천랑; Chinese romanization: Tiānláng; Japanese romanization: Tenrō; Korean romanization: Cheonlang) in Mansion of Jǐng (井宿), while Japanese vernacular name of the star is 青星 (Aoboshi, "blue star"). In Scandinavia, the star has been known as Lokabrenna ("burning done by Loki", or "Loki's torch").
click image to enlarge
Friday, August 17, 2007
Santa Monica Carousel
My horse left its pole~
upshot, cloud by cloud
quick as a bullet in a dream
to a trumpet, skyborn---past
two in puddles of each other
someplace tropics moisten love
who left a teatime burial early
and felt our fictive shadow say:
"Bury the spurs and whip the pony wet,
and any white and pasty silhouette
let hang in your mother's sky."
Can't hurt you now
Patti Smith
A bus to the beach, that one that goes down Santa Monica but where everyone gets off on Broadway. When I get the message from Madamina re where to meet Stephanie, I divine perfection: The Lobster. The place has morphed from lobster shack to tourist trap over the decades, but it has enough sun and sky and view to remain amenable, sunlit. Steph all elegant beachy, as she always is on her home turf startles me on seeing her----trop belle pour toi---top and bottom and choker all the various colors of a sand dollar. Vodka tonic for her and Tropical iced tea for me, spinning around our low maintenance New York lives and then around Madamina and then around Kierkegaard for an hour, ducking into the Carousel then the pier then the midway with the candy colored lights on the rides coming on slowly, what better warm-up band for Patti Smith could there be?
We stake some striated space with Stephanie's Time Warner blanket---there is an identical one a scant four blankets SSE from hers---next to a quixotic AA woman in a silver top hat, already dancing slowly, swaying---she knows the music. The usual free venue announcements....they are mostly hortatory, urging us to ride the Blue Bus...got it, indeed, did it. Call Madamina, stress in her voice, she makes it...the concert kicks off promplty.
Ms. Smith does half her own material and half her signature reworkings from a classic rock Real Book. She does not cover other tunes (especially by other hard hard rocking men) so much as reinvent them, turning them inside out, re-arranging them and retailoring them to fit her own skin. First indulgent sampling of another artist is the rarely borrowed, uniquely Jimi Are You Experienced? and even at that point the message is clear: it's time for uninhibited girls to sing like uninhibited boys. She and the band space the anthem out a bit even more than its original psychedelic moorings---this is the way things will go through the evening. The guitars however are all rhythm to Smith, who does most of the spacing all by herself with her vocals. Choosing the title track instead of far better known other songs from the album gives her a chance to luxuriate within its insistence.
Kimberly comes early on, a tender-moment-in-a-stoned-room anthem that made Horses such a defining moment for the seventies. At one point, Steph whispers to me "Wow, it's OK not to be stoned and do this!" and about two minutes later Smith slowly says..."Not stoned...but...beautiful..." That's the kind of wavelength everyone, everyone is on---everyone knows Patti and most of all themselves so well that we can all feel like we're chatting together. Patti waves to the crowd while others are soloing, we wave back, she talks to everyone as though everyone is talking to her and she's trying to get a few of her salient facts into the conversation. Similarly, her conspiratorial We Three ("the stars shine so suspiciously for we three") is the kind of intimate dialog all on its own, but to which everyone can relate and feels party to, and so she whispers an aside to us, letting us in on the fact that it's about hanging out with Television at CBGB circa 1974.
She straddles many genres, that's what inventive artists do. But sex is what she's great at, it's her genius; she's an icon and a fashion icon and a holy icon but her sexuality is a resolutely earthy controlling-goddess blue-collar variety. The ripped tee-shirt sexuality of Because the Night comes out simply chilling, something like urgency and poetry tightly bundled---she does her own understated and gratuitous osciallation on the "can't hurt you now" that leads into the refrain, drawing attention to this...this distillation of sex into a fleeting moment of escape from pain, which it so often is...there are lots of, say, forty-seven and forty-eight and forty-nine and fifty-year-olds in the audience, and have not much to do other than to nod and dance and relate...and her fabled sexually ambitious spin on Gloria, out Vanning Van and bringing it the kind of club-level energy that has the whole midway pogoing, maybe all the way to the ferris wheel, maybe even all the way to the crescent moon over the water.
The other pieces from elsewhere---including Harrison's Within You and Without You (who does that?), the Stones Gimme Shelter, and an I'm-softly-unclassifiable, but-I-really-invented-grunge-too examination of Smells Like Teen Spirit where she ends screaming "na na na na, Nirvana na" to the chorus...appreciative, but impish too...all are elaborately twisted into something that service she and she alone. (The idea of Patti Smith singing Gimme Shelter is like Sid Vicious singing My Way---you're meant to marvel at the mere possibility of it---but she does a characteristically marvellous job of it nonetheless). The band near closing rumbles sinisterly suggesting the Doors When the Music's Over but she turns it into Soul Kitchen, and even is brilliant enough to stitch in the Blue Bus lyric from When the Music's Over, to play with the promotional backdrop to the evening. She keeps a soft-spot psychedelica spoken monologue in pocket for White Rabbit, a nod to the way Springsteen would do it (he co-wrote Because the Night during studio sessions where they got to know each other) and if Patti Smith is our icon, Grace Slick is hers, at least for the moment as a Jersey girl after all, the acid monolog tailored specifically to Los Angeles, to the parking lot of the Sportsmen's Lodge, to disorientation and painting and palm trees...she can't find the impossible Slickian note to start White Rabbit to save her life even after two attempts (who can?) and she even acknowledges as much, but that's the point, see...she won't hit all the notes but she does it anyway, and so should you, even if you can't do it, do it anyway, it may come out better than you ever dreamed.
On the way to the Indian restaurant, Steph who knows Brazil very well, reminds me, "This is what they do in Brazil, everyone does everyone else's songs, it's no big deal, it's what you do." The Weekly didn't get this when writing up the recent tour, but Patti Smith has been doing this for over thirty years, and her voice is identical now to what it was then---and for this scribe it has been thirty years since the last spotting, and nothing's missing, nothing at all, it's just summer night perfection for her tour-ending stop on the Santa Monica pier, just east of the candy colored rides of the midway and below the crescent moon.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
acuarela y divertissement
~
Madamina at dinner: "You know why I don't ride horses anymore? Because the rentals don't let you run with them anymore. They train them not to run. So what's the point of getting on a horse that doesn't run even when you kick it?"
No Sandra, no Lisa Exit at the pool yesterday. Laps alone, in a wide blue lane, a guiding black stripe at the bottom, the track on which to hang your body for a while. On my back, flitting feet to barely float, to barely move, petit battement. Water, sky, an envelope of blue, solitude---who needs to move much? Flow. But also: a news camera crew taking pictures of the pool, interviewing people---hey, are you reading along?
Madaminia ancora: "You shouldn't have told the MayorSam people about Patti Smith. Your fault if we can't see her."
But look at that Spanish further down: ." Loosely translated: "A watercolor of homicide by Beckham." (Describing one of his beautifully horrifying free kick goals, the first for nuestra ciudad). We haven't seen any sports told like that in town since Jim Murray. Beckham: worth it for the Spanish sportswriting alone.
The way we are known remains unknown to us---until someone lets us know: The No 2 Home Depot movement, a little giddy with a decent victory, has a nice testimonial up, top right. Glad to be of service.
Diana and Phoebe and June et al.: 37,500 words---half a full-length---no end in sight.
~
Madamina at dinner: "You know why I don't ride horses anymore? Because the rentals don't let you run with them anymore. They train them not to run. So what's the point of getting on a horse that doesn't run even when you kick it?"
° ° ° ° °
No Sandra, no Lisa Exit at the pool yesterday. Laps alone, in a wide blue lane, a guiding black stripe at the bottom, the track on which to hang your body for a while. On my back, flitting feet to barely float, to barely move, petit battement. Water, sky, an envelope of blue, solitude---who needs to move much? Flow. But also: a news camera crew taking pictures of the pool, interviewing people---hey, are you reading along?
° ° ° ° °
Madaminia ancora: "You shouldn't have told the MayorSam people about Patti Smith. Your fault if we can't see her."
° ° ° ° °
But look at that Spanish further down: ." Loosely translated: "A watercolor of homicide by Beckham." (Describing one of his beautifully horrifying free kick goals, the first for nuestra ciudad). We haven't seen any sports told like that in town since Jim Murray. Beckham: worth it for the Spanish sportswriting alone.
° ° ° ° °
The way we are known remains unknown to us---until someone lets us know: The No 2 Home Depot movement, a little giddy with a decent victory, has a nice testimonial up, top right. Glad to be of service.
° ° ° ° °
Diana and Phoebe and June et al.: 37,500 words---half a full-length---no end in sight.
~
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Beach breach
JM, Broken Fence Lone Pole, Playa del Rey, 2.21.03
This is the photograph that was alternative cover to The Plasma of Terror. The image is not so elliptical---the broken fence is easily read as a line of flight, and a deterritorializing, and also dilapidation, a deterioration. The pole bisecting the open space is a kind of obelisk, but also a marker, an acknowledgement of commencement, a final barrier to entry that must be sidestepped. There is both smooth and striated space in the photograph; the fact that most of the lines are neither parallel nor perpendicular to the borders may lend the image some energy it would not otherwise have.
click image to enlarge
Well, sure, the mother...
JM, Virgin Grotto, Our Mother of Good Counsel, 5.17.02
Today on the way to somewhere I wasn't ready to be on the way to anyway, I ran into Paul.
Paul: once told a pastor in one of those liturgy committe debates that the pastor didn't know liturgy. That caused a famous level of disruption in the parish---disruption I took a shine to.
Paul, encore: in a classroom of neophytes, he used that wonderful ultra-liberal Jesuit term for the post-resurrection Gospel stories: "the apparition stories." Paul: Jesuit trained, formerly angry, formerly indignant, ever skeptical, doubts well beyond Thomas...
And now---open. And now he is becoming-Buddhist and largely At One With the Universe, you can see-feel-hear it.
We have a common friend in John August Swanson, and Paul reminds me that John will be in an exhibition at the Cathedral September 8. Paul tells me that John needs to get the piece framed right away to exhibit it, and the piece currently has 81 colors---he's going to leave it unfinished, although his final vision calls for six more colors. This may be his last seriegraph, he says.
Beyond John's lifelong vocation in art, he also has been a key neighbor in orchestrating the peace rallys at the mad corner of Sunset and Hollywood and Virgil and Hillhurst, where the Vista Theater is. Paul is a part of them too. But now, this:
"You know, I've just cut loose from so many things," Paul says.
"Well, I find I often hang on to things. A friend tells me she was recently told, 'You work from the wreck'---and she warmed up to the thought. At minimum, pain is both formative and informative of art," I say.
"Well," says Paul, "I can see like Bukowski must have seen it: pain worked for me one time, why not stick with it, why let it go...I let it go and I'm wide open now." He holds his arms up. "So much about the way we perceive things...we're all in a flow, you know?"
I like the point. We go back and forth on that a bit. I tell him about Thich Nhat Hanh coming to Loyola in three weeks, how I might get together a group for that---he doesn't seem interested. Indeed, I had thought both he and John might be---maybe the way for him means not working for peace but living it? I can only guess, I don't ask.
We discuss Taoism and he says, "Well, sure, the mother..."
Ah, perfect. To understand the son, you need to understand the mother, the Tao says: "Those who discover the mother understand the children." [LaFargue renders it: The world has a Source, the Mother of the World.] That's why Tao itself as the Mother of Buddhism is so Marian to me of late. That may even be why I'm more interested in Mary than in hieratic Catholicism in recent months. What mother did this for the world/to the world/in the world?
I don't know about Paul's mother. I know about mine. I knew John's---she came to mass when she could. She passed away three or four years ago---John himself was over sixty, still closer to her than to anyone else.
One day, she told me, "I'm ninety-three---but jeez, some days I feel like I'm a hundred!"
She sang opera, which is why John connected us.
I let Paul know that my connection to Buddhism is at the elementary level a physical one: I can do a full lotus, and have been able to since childhood.
"I could never do that---of course you are drawn to Buddhism!" he says. "It's in your body...maybe earlier from another life..."
"Maybe. A friend of mine said last night: 'The body does not lie.'"
"Exactly," he says. "Of course."
John and Paul, treasures urbi et orbi.
click image to enlarge
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Here and there
~
"You're gaunt," she says, even before she really sees me. "You're gaunt."
Later: "I'm going to make a poem of all the quotes."
The Masai at Book Soup gets stares, stares back.
"You should be so lucky," I say.
Madamina at Figaro: "They changed owners last week? You're kidding! Are they French too?"
"She's showing off." "She is showing off!"
"Hollywood Park Race 9 WIN 1 TOTAL $40 16 December 06" falls out of my Passport.
"He's too young to know enough to pour us a sample."
"It's all location, in a funny way," the author had said at the reading.
~
"You're gaunt," she says, even before she really sees me. "You're gaunt."
° ° ° ° °
Later: "I'm going to make a poem of all the quotes."
° ° ° ° °
The Masai at Book Soup gets stares, stares back.
° ° ° ° °
"You should be so lucky," I say.
° ° ° ° °
Madamina at Figaro: "They changed owners last week? You're kidding! Are they French too?"
° ° ° ° °
"She's showing off." "She is showing off!"
° ° ° ° °
"Hollywood Park Race 9 WIN 1 TOTAL $40 16 December 06" falls out of my Passport.
° ° ° ° °
"He's too young to know enough to pour us a sample."
° ° ° ° °
"It's all location, in a funny way," the author had said at the reading.
~
Space without walls
Noted:
It would have been something to behold. In 2004 Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn was invited to create a piece for the Walker Art Center 'Walker Without Walls' series.His idea: To build a 50 foot replica of the book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari....
° ° ° ° °
more on Thomas Hirschhorn
more on A Thousand Plateaus
more on Gilles Deleuze
more on Felix Guattari
more on nomads
Monday, August 13, 2007
Place de la Discorde
Elaine Dundy , 9/15/83
"I'd taken my lamb by the hand to the slaughter and nobody even wanted it."--Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado.
° ° ° ° °
more on: Elaine Dundy; French 75; Champs Elysées Cocktail; Tuesday
ex libris
ex libris JM, Der Blaue Reiter: Zeichnungen und Graphik, Buchheim Verlag, Feldafing Obb.
„Der Künstler ist kein Sonntagskind des Lebens: Er hat kein Recht, pflichtlos zu leben, er hat eine schwere Arbeit zu verrichten, die oft zu seinem Kreuz wird. Er muß wissen, daß seine Taten, Gefühle, Gedanken das feine unbetastbare, aber feste Material bilden, woraus seine Werke entstehen, und daß er deswegen im Leben nicht frei ist, sondern nur in der Kunst.“ -- Wassily Kandinsky
["The artist is not a Sunday Child of Life: he has no right to live without duty; he has hard work to do, which often becomes his cross. He must know that his acts, feelings, thoughts are not wanderings, but are firm material for fabrication, material from which his works stem; and that he is not free therefore in Life, but only in Art."]
click to enlarge
~
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Good Housekeeping
~
~
Snug in a box, Kleenex
is ready to wipe, dab,
spot, sponge, ab-
sorb the latest
indiscretion,
discretion,
desperation,
secretion, tear
the box full of thousands
of arriving dementias
injuries, failures, whoopsies.
It is quickly fisted
and tossed away just after
the moment life became
memory and thunder, right
into the trashcan, thoughtlessly.
~
Blurred
Anne Demeulemeester and Patti Smith
"Blurring boundaries: The designer and the singer walk the runway at the end of Demeulemeester's spring 2007 show."
--Fashion Rocks (supplement to Architectural Digest), page unknown
click to enlarge
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Austere
Anne Demeulemeester
"Long before Demeulemeester started her own line, she endured several years at an austere, bourgeois Belgian fashion house, all the better to learn how to cut and tailor, despite the fact that the house didn't always appreciate her ideas. 'They put a coat I designed onto a broom, as if it was a scarecrow,' she says, laughing."
--Fashion Rocks (supplement to Architectural Digest), page unknown
click to enlarge
Friday, August 10, 2007
Rumpled
Patti Smith
"That's how their friendship works: The see each other when they can be in the same European city, because while Smith has toured the world over, Demeulemeester has chosen to focus her life on Antwerp, rarely venturing beyond it except to go to Paris for work. Smith continues, 'I always wear Ann's clothes because...I feel like myself in them. I can wear them onstage, sleep on the tour bus in them...You know, I always find it so funny: I can be all rumpled from being on the road, but I'm still in the most beautiful clothes in the world.'"
--Fashion Rocks (supplement to Architectural Digest), page unknown
click to enlarge
~
32[6]
~
"The Valley Spirit is undying."
This is mysterious Femininity.
The Abode of mysterious Femininity:
This is the Root of Heaven and Earth.
It seems to endure on and on.
One who uses It never wears out.
--Lao-Tzu, Tao Te-Ching, 32[6], LaFargue trans.
"The Valley Spirit is undying."
This is mysterious Femininity.
The Abode of mysterious Femininity:
This is the Root of Heaven and Earth.
It seems to endure on and on.
One who uses It never wears out.
--Lao-Tzu, Tao Te-Ching, 32[6], LaFargue trans.
Water
Joel Phillips, An Empty Chair (detail), watercolor on paper, 1987
Yesterday between four and five p.m. I went swimming at my local Griffith Park Pool. I probably haven't gone swimming at a public pool since I was twelve.
Swimming is free (free!) with a City library card. Otherwise, for an adult it's $1.50.
The City runs a whopping thirty-five pools, open mostly through the summer---Griffith Park's operation schedule has been extended through mid-September.
You can probably thank that fine City Rec and Parks venue The Greek Theater for the fact that swimming at a Rec and Parks City pool is free for most residents of this pueblo. While Rec and Parks isn't a purely proprietary City department (for "proprietary" read "money-making," like the DWP and Harbor) , venues like the Greek help keep the books flush.
I didn't do much classic swimming; mostly I did a slow backstroke, my favorite stroke as a kid, the one that lets you stare into the empty summer sky. I was quite slow compared to the girls on either side of me.
One of them had a tattoo of peacock feathers on her back. She and I got out at the same time. I said to a lifeguard, "What a hidden treasure!" and the peacock girl overheard and said, "It's just amazing---I wish I had thought of it earlier this summer."
The pool at the Riverside complex is a great one; it's way better than the one I grew up with. It's about fifty meters long---I'm guessing---but they rope it off into five sections. You swim laps the short way (there are tiled lanes) Kids are mostly down at one end, adults at the other, and an underutilized section that's nine feet deep in between.
You should hear men scream in the cold showers before swimming. I saw two otherwise macho Latino guys absolutely shrieking. It's an obvious moment of weakness for many.
Between four and five on a hot but breezy August day, it's paradise. Ms. Exit said, "Don't tell anybody about it!" But how can you resist? Besides, summer's over half over.
click image to enlarge
~
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Unstructured time
~
I do everything slowly, extremely slowly.
Evidence education: it took me ten years to get a BA and will likely take me twenty-five more to get an MA, for instance. If. (But education, of course, is not measured by degree).
Or try the workplace: I was forty years old before I had my first full-time job at which I spent more than a year of employment. (But vocation is not measured 9-5).
And will I get married? It's been ten years now (but intimacy is not measured by ceremony)...
Why the tortoise, why not the hare? The question, I think, answers itself when you put it that way. But why the tortoise...
There's been a lot of loss in my life, and especially a lot of mistaken identity---mistaken identity, which is, of course, also loss, some of the worst loss of all, in fact: a loss of self unto oneself. The people who I am closest to are mostly in the same boat. They know like me that...
They know like me that loss while daunting to endure is also poetic, gorgeous. You linger. To arrive at the point at which you celebrate it as much as moan because of it, you need barriers, solitude, contemplation, introspection. You throw up the big American territorial signs: Do Not Disturb; No Trespassing; Do Not Resuscitate. You need to let it work through you and run its course.
You look at loss as you listen to haunting phrases within music. You latch onto refrains, which stabilize (children in peril sing the same refrains, over and over). The refrains are structure within your unstructured time of moaning.
Those of you who ask about the novel, thanks so much for asking. It's one dimension of a lot of dimensions, but it is a critical one, a personal one, a precious one. Its theme is mistaken identity, of others, of one's self.
~
I do everything slowly, extremely slowly.
Evidence education: it took me ten years to get a BA and will likely take me twenty-five more to get an MA, for instance. If. (But education, of course, is not measured by degree).
Or try the workplace: I was forty years old before I had my first full-time job at which I spent more than a year of employment. (But vocation is not measured 9-5).
And will I get married? It's been ten years now (but intimacy is not measured by ceremony)...
° ° ° ° °
Why the tortoise, why not the hare? The question, I think, answers itself when you put it that way. But why the tortoise...
There's been a lot of loss in my life, and especially a lot of mistaken identity---mistaken identity, which is, of course, also loss, some of the worst loss of all, in fact: a loss of self unto oneself. The people who I am closest to are mostly in the same boat. They know like me that...
They know like me that loss while daunting to endure is also poetic, gorgeous. You linger. To arrive at the point at which you celebrate it as much as moan because of it, you need barriers, solitude, contemplation, introspection. You throw up the big American territorial signs: Do Not Disturb; No Trespassing; Do Not Resuscitate. You need to let it work through you and run its course.
You look at loss as you listen to haunting phrases within music. You latch onto refrains, which stabilize (children in peril sing the same refrains, over and over). The refrains are structure within your unstructured time of moaning.
° ° ° ° °
Those of you who ask about the novel, thanks so much for asking. It's one dimension of a lot of dimensions, but it is a critical one, a personal one, a precious one. Its theme is mistaken identity, of others, of one's self.
~
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Workpoints
~
Lisa Exit loves Lisa's latest.
Silver Strand: "Oh, I really see nothing small in taking in a race between service and cemetary. That race may have saved your sanity. Very smart. I don't think the dead mind. We mind, but I just don't think that they do."
Thomas Mann: "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult to do than it is for other people."
~
Lisa Exit loves Lisa's latest.
° ° ° ° °
Silver Strand: "Oh, I really see nothing small in taking in a race between service and cemetary. That race may have saved your sanity. Very smart. I don't think the dead mind. We mind, but I just don't think that they do."
° ° ° ° °
Thomas Mann: "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult to do than it is for other people."
~
7.2.91
unsent card to Ellen, 7.2.91, obverse
unsent card to Ellen, 7.2.91, text
click images to enlarge
image: Horoscope of Iskandar-Sultan ibn Umar Shaykh (detail) Compiled and copied by Mahmud ibn Yahya ibn al-Hasan al-Kashi
Shiraz, dated A.H. 22 Dhu'l-Hijja 813 (A.D. 18 April 1411)
Opaque watercolor, ink, and gold on paper
text: ink, battery acid
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Le Cru et le cuit
How much you forget about your table when you are all seated at it; and how much you remember of the people who sit at it when they are not. Mostly, you see it empty. It holds your plans, your work, your hopes, your replenishment, your catechism. It clinks with dishes and with drinks; there are agreements, arguments, wars over it; it has the capacity to shock, to reveal, to inspire. Linens for every season; it is always ordinary time at the table; there are serenely bright summer napkins, autumn leaves from down the street, winter wire-nestles off of the necks of bottles of Spanish wine, spring roses in City water. Discussions, sometimes exasperated ones, over everything---who likes brut and who likes sec, who can't have seared ahi, who will insist on overcooking, who has dietary restrictions. Shoes are either comfortable or not, and a bed is where you are when you are not in shoes, but a dining room table is the fulcrum off which you tilt and push your world.
Tuesday, 8/7, 6:58 a.m.
Summer began 6/21, 11:06 a.m. PDT
Summer ends 9/23, 2:51 a.m. PDT
On Tuesday, 8/7, at 6:58 a.m.---your summer was half over.
Monday, August 6, 2007
Conceptual Q's @ 11:06
~
What do all the photos all say? Is there a studium and a punctum? Where are the boundaries? Who is attentive to moaning? Who is whose publicist? Biographer? Muse? Who is water and who fire and who air? Who fixes broken side mirrors? Who makes deals? Who remembers? Who forgets? Who answers questions? Who asks them? Who uses the Kinsey scale? Why does the City feel older but less mature late at night? Who knows what? Who killed the pork chops? And you, Garcia Lorca, what where you doing down by the watermelons? Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
What do all the photos all say? Is there a studium and a punctum? Where are the boundaries? Who is attentive to moaning? Who is whose publicist? Biographer? Muse? Who is water and who fire and who air? Who fixes broken side mirrors? Who makes deals? Who remembers? Who forgets? Who answers questions? Who asks them? Who uses the Kinsey scale? Why does the City feel older but less mature late at night? Who knows what? Who killed the pork chops? And you, Garcia Lorca, what where you doing down by the watermelons? Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Chinatown
~
Saturday, Madamina: let's go to Chinatown. Near simultaneous call from Lisa Exit: let's go to a play. Madamina wins, Chinatown's easier, she's tired-er. I have to take it from there. There's an opening at L2kontemporary on the north end. Group show, lots of artists. Andiamo.
Idling out front of Exit's. We're 45 minutes late but she hasn't picked out shoes anyway. "Flats!" Madamina screams. Good thing we're late too, because there's a Dodger game, and we have to go up Scott and around Stadium Way to College into Chinatown. Love knowing these routes; see Smiles of a Summer Drive. Or even Distressed.
Chinatown, on the south end behind an abandoned cab a third of the way into our metered space. Warm wind blowing like a simoon. Confusion: where is it? 990 seems an impossible address, but finally, there it is, way up there.
Pop tarts and Cheeze-Its on a table in the hallway. Ms. Exit splits a brown sugar cinnamon with me. Madamina notes a door, not the gallery's, the numbers 200 written in felt tip on the door. "What do you think goes on in suite 200?" she asks me.
Sure enough, one of about thirty artists exhibiting incorporates Pop Tarts in assemblage pieces---they are portrait-by-objects, like those open drawers that realists liked to paint in America in the 19th century, but with a crucified Pop Tart in the middle of the frame, under glass. I'm intrigued---the girls, not so much.
Packed of course. Over there, that's Wendy, and her husband perpetually affable Barry---Lisa and I saw him at LA Louver about six weeks ago, at that art show at which there was no art. I said as much to him and he looked down and said, "I have a friend exhibiting..." Barry himself has a piece in the show. I look it up. His is hanging right above Gronk's---who doesn't want that in LA?
He tells us not so shyly but a little that he's now in the permanent collection at the Getty, and I like that because we knew him when. The piece in the Getty is a conceptual piece on video from 1975. The Getty: the City's new pedigree; screw the Weitzman old guard anyway, and aren't you sick of all the MoCA rehashings of collections from the '60's?
Ms. Exit warms to a piece by Joe E. Grant, Untitled House Shape, looks also like a tombstone. Madamina confesses she likes "at least five or six pieces" which is a good number for us.
Barry's back is to us now: his tee-shirt says "Duchamp" on the back, like he's on that team.
Meet the show's curator, Simone Gad. Demure, pleasant, polite---all shocking qualities in a curator. Figures: also an actor; born in Brussels. Her own work is provocative.
Madamina spots an acquaintance, Mary. Mary has a husband who'd like to exhibit some work. I don't know if I like Mary's husband because he made no attempt to talk to me and seemed to crowd me out of their circle. Could be a misreading. Hey, that's my girlfriend you're not letting me catch up with!
Out into the balmy night, so early August we might as well be on vacation. Now it's all unstructured, a Chinatown fire drill. The girls recommend Chung King Road and we stumble into a fantastic exhibit of works by Armand Rascon, who we chat up a bit. Art: very friendly when it's unpretentious. Rascon is multimedia, first thing that catches our eye is a projection of blobs of liquid color sandwiched between clear plates---when agitated and projected, they look like amoebas floating. Rascon also has a series of devotional shrines devoted to a boy who drowned in a rip-tide in Baja that Rascon, a marathon swimmer, was also caught in himself the subsequent day. The shrines, with photos and devotional candles on ledges, are powerful, wish I had one, but we'd have to put it in the basement---or, hmmm, this room, the study. Great tacos. (Nice diet yesterday: all that, plus a Tommy burger in Sunland Tujunga.)
A walk on the other side, past Hop Louie and down Jung Jing. Lynn spots a guy in a shiny grey suit and blowdried blond hair: "Look, it's Warhol! Hi, Andy!" she says---easily largest laugh of the night. Back: car, taxi still there, College, Scott, au revoir Ms. Exit, Glendale, and the north rim of Silver Lake. "That was fun," Madamina says. And an hour later, from the bathroom: "Thanks honey. That was fun." Sometimes, despite myself, despite hating to get out on Saturday night, I choose the right thing.
Saturday, Madamina: let's go to Chinatown. Near simultaneous call from Lisa Exit: let's go to a play. Madamina wins, Chinatown's easier, she's tired-er. I have to take it from there. There's an opening at L2kontemporary on the north end. Group show, lots of artists. Andiamo.
Idling out front of Exit's. We're 45 minutes late but she hasn't picked out shoes anyway. "Flats!" Madamina screams. Good thing we're late too, because there's a Dodger game, and we have to go up Scott and around Stadium Way to College into Chinatown. Love knowing these routes; see Smiles of a Summer Drive. Or even Distressed.
Chinatown, on the south end behind an abandoned cab a third of the way into our metered space. Warm wind blowing like a simoon. Confusion: where is it? 990 seems an impossible address, but finally, there it is, way up there.
Pop tarts and Cheeze-Its on a table in the hallway. Ms. Exit splits a brown sugar cinnamon with me. Madamina notes a door, not the gallery's, the numbers 200 written in felt tip on the door. "What do you think goes on in suite 200?" she asks me.
Sure enough, one of about thirty artists exhibiting incorporates Pop Tarts in assemblage pieces---they are portrait-by-objects, like those open drawers that realists liked to paint in America in the 19th century, but with a crucified Pop Tart in the middle of the frame, under glass. I'm intrigued---the girls, not so much.
Packed of course. Over there, that's Wendy, and her husband perpetually affable Barry---Lisa and I saw him at LA Louver about six weeks ago, at that art show at which there was no art. I said as much to him and he looked down and said, "I have a friend exhibiting..." Barry himself has a piece in the show. I look it up. His is hanging right above Gronk's---who doesn't want that in LA?
He tells us not so shyly but a little that he's now in the permanent collection at the Getty, and I like that because we knew him when. The piece in the Getty is a conceptual piece on video from 1975. The Getty: the City's new pedigree; screw the Weitzman old guard anyway, and aren't you sick of all the MoCA rehashings of collections from the '60's?
Ms. Exit warms to a piece by Joe E. Grant, Untitled House Shape, looks also like a tombstone. Madamina confesses she likes "at least five or six pieces" which is a good number for us.
Barry's back is to us now: his tee-shirt says "Duchamp" on the back, like he's on that team.
Meet the show's curator, Simone Gad. Demure, pleasant, polite---all shocking qualities in a curator. Figures: also an actor; born in Brussels. Her own work is provocative.
Madamina spots an acquaintance, Mary. Mary has a husband who'd like to exhibit some work. I don't know if I like Mary's husband because he made no attempt to talk to me and seemed to crowd me out of their circle. Could be a misreading. Hey, that's my girlfriend you're not letting me catch up with!
Out into the balmy night, so early August we might as well be on vacation. Now it's all unstructured, a Chinatown fire drill. The girls recommend Chung King Road and we stumble into a fantastic exhibit of works by Armand Rascon, who we chat up a bit. Art: very friendly when it's unpretentious. Rascon is multimedia, first thing that catches our eye is a projection of blobs of liquid color sandwiched between clear plates---when agitated and projected, they look like amoebas floating. Rascon also has a series of devotional shrines devoted to a boy who drowned in a rip-tide in Baja that Rascon, a marathon swimmer, was also caught in himself the subsequent day. The shrines, with photos and devotional candles on ledges, are powerful, wish I had one, but we'd have to put it in the basement---or, hmmm, this room, the study. Great tacos. (Nice diet yesterday: all that, plus a Tommy burger in Sunland Tujunga.)
A walk on the other side, past Hop Louie and down Jung Jing. Lynn spots a guy in a shiny grey suit and blowdried blond hair: "Look, it's Warhol! Hi, Andy!" she says---easily largest laugh of the night. Back: car, taxi still there, College, Scott, au revoir Ms. Exit, Glendale, and the north rim of Silver Lake. "That was fun," Madamina says. And an hour later, from the bathroom: "Thanks honey. That was fun." Sometimes, despite myself, despite hating to get out on Saturday night, I choose the right thing.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
City of Bloggers
~
I have a featured piece in the Daily News's Sunday's Viewpoint (also on newsstands Saturday) "City of Bloggers: LA Blogs are Voice of the People." The piece is on the blogosphere in general and local political blogging in particular.
I have to say that I much admire the Daily News's editorial team for taking a chance on the piece. It's not often that you get to slip thoughts on Anti-Oedipus, Baudrillardian hyperreality, and personal philosophical predispotions of your own into the leisurely Sunday summer paper. Thanks much to those people there for letting me run with some ideas, and for featuring the piece so splendidly.
What I most personally like about the piece is that it's Janus-faced. I've sort of straddled print and blogging in the past---I love the immediacy of blogging but also the editorial exchange that characterizes an op-ed---and I think the piece ends up an unvarnished look at how blogs are and how they relate to a blogger's life.
Local political dynamo Eric Garcetti leads the piece off and may even lend it some extra credibility; thanks to him too for his time on how politicians see the blogosphere.
I also was invited to pick a dozen blogs and make some comments about them too. Some are interested in local politics; some I think owe it to their general readers to be moreso. For those unfamiliar with the local blogosphere, I think it's a pretty good topline.
Reactions:
~
I have a featured piece in the Daily News's Sunday's Viewpoint (also on newsstands Saturday) "City of Bloggers: LA Blogs are Voice of the People." The piece is on the blogosphere in general and local political blogging in particular.
I have to say that I much admire the Daily News's editorial team for taking a chance on the piece. It's not often that you get to slip thoughts on Anti-Oedipus, Baudrillardian hyperreality, and personal philosophical predispotions of your own into the leisurely Sunday summer paper. Thanks much to those people there for letting me run with some ideas, and for featuring the piece so splendidly.
What I most personally like about the piece is that it's Janus-faced. I've sort of straddled print and blogging in the past---I love the immediacy of blogging but also the editorial exchange that characterizes an op-ed---and I think the piece ends up an unvarnished look at how blogs are and how they relate to a blogger's life.
Local political dynamo Eric Garcetti leads the piece off and may even lend it some extra credibility; thanks to him too for his time on how politicians see the blogosphere.
I also was invited to pick a dozen blogs and make some comments about them too. Some are interested in local politics; some I think owe it to their general readers to be moreso. For those unfamiliar with the local blogosphere, I think it's a pretty good topline.
Reactions:
You've got Mailander (Will Campbell, blogging.la)
various quotes (Luke Ford, lukeford.net)
Blogs and the Hyperreality (Michael Higby, mayorsam.blogspot.com)
Essential blogs (LA City Nerd)
Week in Review Times Two (Cindy Mosqueda) (didn't know if you wanted your real name in or not, Cindy!)
Daily News says I am one of the best in LA (Don Garza, centralcitye.blogspot.com)
~
Glassy angst
~
The Guardian really fumbled this Bird and Bee review:
The plastic sexual angst that runs through the album is analogous to the kind of stupid-me-again tension that runs through the enormously popular yet generally libertine Grey's Anatomy---not a surprise that the title cut was featured on one of the shows. On the show, someone will always spin out, feel bad, get their tender consoling moment, and do it all again---in real life, we put on a cd like this one.
~o
The Guardian really fumbled this Bird and Bee review:
Imagine seeing the girl from Ipanema shivering on a beach in Norway - that's roughly the sensation you get listening to the Bird and the Bee's debut album.Check.
The melodies are warm, the influences (bossa nova and jazz standards) mellifluous, but a chink of ice is lodged in its sophisticated heart.Wrong everywhere. Pulses of melody are tamed down to minimal, more Brian Eno than bossa nova. And the chink of ice is the point, not a problem.
Effing Boyfriend, a dismissive rebuke to a needy chap, is particularly piercing, and there's something unnerving about the way she sings "Are you prepared for the atom bomb, are you prepared for me?" in Preparedness.He's not needy, he's sensitive, aware, the kind of man women say they like and do but also fear permitting themselves. Those are not men who are needy.
Greg Kurstin, the "bee" side of the partnership, contributes his own surprises, building up the music from layer upon layer of rippling percussion and glassy, chiming notes until every moment seems to contain something new.It's nice to say, but not necessarily so. Glassy, yes...the whole disk is a wine tasting. The percussion isn't rippling, though, it's shimmering. And part of the point of minimalism is not to make whatever is introduced sound new but to lay it artfully within an already ongoing refrain.
It's impressive - but so cool and calculated it can be hard to like.Among cool and calculating composers: George Harrison, Mozart, Bach. A pantheon. Hard to like? I haven't played it for one person who hasn't adored it immediately.
The plastic sexual angst that runs through the album is analogous to the kind of stupid-me-again tension that runs through the enormously popular yet generally libertine Grey's Anatomy---not a surprise that the title cut was featured on one of the shows. On the show, someone will always spin out, feel bad, get their tender consoling moment, and do it all again---in real life, we put on a cd like this one.
~o
Friday, August 3, 2007
Loops
Alishya, What I might want to be, watercolor pencil and printer paper, 8.3.07
click to enlarge
The refrigerator door: a busy place this week. Tuesday, a fresh and timely magnet. Last night, an Indian princess drawing through dessert---child drawings, always full of genius.
Madamina doesn't serve up just any paper: she gets glossy 11x17 and the watercolor pencils. You put these up on the fridge with tape and magnets.
What I see: UN colors, peace, candles, garlands, other girls. Also: perspective, a receding tunnel.
Especially noteworthy: lines on the left have loops, lines on the right generally do not.
Madamina: vurrry careful to check with the artist which way was right-side-up.
Small is Beautiful
The other day: a ringing cellphone. A girl running: "Oh, I have to get that, it could be the Obama campaign."
Well...watch for Obama's position on rebuilding the military. Our chum Doug Bandow says:
Well...watch for Obama's position on rebuilding the military. Our chum Doug Bandow says:
The U.S. doesn't need a bigger military. It needs a smaller foreign policy. In any case, there is no cause to consider conscription. Voluntarism works.Republicans: stand tall on shrinking the military. Twenty-seven years ago: it was Carter who made nineteen-year-olds register, and toyed with compulsory service...Reagan said no compulsory service. Bandow was there to position the policy.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
I Promessi Sposi
Need to duck a dinner. Silver Lake Wine wine tasting; a nearby scene, Xers drifting in from Glendale Boulevard like good summer weather. Not drinking but there anyway.
Bemused LisaExit, leaning on a tabletop wine display, evaluating shoes more closely than wine. I spot some on a beauty: black halter, black polo pants, black beaded necklace with topaz, brass hoop earrings, touch of vermillion in raven tresses like so many these days. Nude lipstick. Shaved eyebrows, penciled to curve a little more than they actually do. Navy blue patent leather clutch. Now for the shoes: open toe blood orange pumps with a sling back, sturdy heels. Shoes! Nice work.
Someone asks if we're a couple: initially flummoxed, good laughs ultimately emerge.
Ms. Exit discovers a wine blogger, Mike Brosnan, at the bar; I hone in. Serious, takes copious notes. Knew Cinnabar; good sign. Has a wine locker in the building. Like all good bloggers, he arrives in entourage (think: Cathy Seipp, who lived within a tee shot of this place). Orbiting about are Amanda from Kansas and Debbie the writer and a guy who tells me I'm brave for wearing flipflops and wonders where I get my pedicures, which he calls manicures.
The pedicure guy wants me to add polish to one toe; no thank you. He is pleased to learn I don't write television; sporting of him. He also broke a full glass of wine---or maybe even a bottle, I never saw it---but handled it as an insouciant good time. Bottle and all traces of it vanish in seconds. He goes to counter for some reason; Amanda whispers to me: "paranoid streak."
Amanda, a Leo, has retro glasses and a quarter-size heart on her forearm, like a stick-on tattoo; Amanda not in Kansas anymore. I asked her what she's listening to this summer, but forgot.
Merely took sniffs of wine. Favorite scent of mine was I Perazzi---a wine Nancy Silverton or her partner Mario Batali imports for La Mozza. Ms. Exit and I speculate about what perazzi means: I win, it means something like a pear.
Isn't Madamina doing a lot of Tibetan prints for next year? Ornate curlycue Cost Plus elephants are seemingly on every other tee-shirt; one, in fact, on a heroic-looking sandalwoody AA, is so rash as to add "Free Tibet" on the back. Speaking of rash: another woman has a tattoo on her bicep of Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror. It's at least ten inches tall, an honest representation. Girl Before a Mirror! Unrepentant narcissism, good luck with that.
Ms. Exit and I walk off. I show her through the roads of the north edge of Silver Lake, the northwest passage that gets you to Griffith Park. Bye-bye, I had a good time too, as good a time as you can have on water. You're not buckled in, she notes. She means it literally, but it's a good metaphor too.
Bemused LisaExit, leaning on a tabletop wine display, evaluating shoes more closely than wine. I spot some on a beauty: black halter, black polo pants, black beaded necklace with topaz, brass hoop earrings, touch of vermillion in raven tresses like so many these days. Nude lipstick. Shaved eyebrows, penciled to curve a little more than they actually do. Navy blue patent leather clutch. Now for the shoes: open toe blood orange pumps with a sling back, sturdy heels. Shoes! Nice work.
Someone asks if we're a couple: initially flummoxed, good laughs ultimately emerge.
Ms. Exit discovers a wine blogger, Mike Brosnan, at the bar; I hone in. Serious, takes copious notes. Knew Cinnabar; good sign. Has a wine locker in the building. Like all good bloggers, he arrives in entourage (think: Cathy Seipp, who lived within a tee shot of this place). Orbiting about are Amanda from Kansas and Debbie the writer and a guy who tells me I'm brave for wearing flipflops and wonders where I get my pedicures, which he calls manicures.
The pedicure guy wants me to add polish to one toe; no thank you. He is pleased to learn I don't write television; sporting of him. He also broke a full glass of wine---or maybe even a bottle, I never saw it---but handled it as an insouciant good time. Bottle and all traces of it vanish in seconds. He goes to counter for some reason; Amanda whispers to me: "paranoid streak."
Amanda, a Leo, has retro glasses and a quarter-size heart on her forearm, like a stick-on tattoo; Amanda not in Kansas anymore. I asked her what she's listening to this summer, but forgot.
Merely took sniffs of wine. Favorite scent of mine was I Perazzi---a wine Nancy Silverton or her partner Mario Batali imports for La Mozza. Ms. Exit and I speculate about what perazzi means: I win, it means something like a pear.
Isn't Madamina doing a lot of Tibetan prints for next year? Ornate curlycue Cost Plus elephants are seemingly on every other tee-shirt; one, in fact, on a heroic-looking sandalwoody AA, is so rash as to add "Free Tibet" on the back. Speaking of rash: another woman has a tattoo on her bicep of Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror. It's at least ten inches tall, an honest representation. Girl Before a Mirror! Unrepentant narcissism, good luck with that.
Ms. Exit and I walk off. I show her through the roads of the north edge of Silver Lake, the northwest passage that gets you to Griffith Park. Bye-bye, I had a good time too, as good a time as you can have on water. You're not buckled in, she notes. She means it literally, but it's a good metaphor too.
Painting and Music
Conversely, we must say that painting does not begin with so-called abstract art but recreates the silhouettes and postures of corporeality, and is already fully in operation in the face-landscape organization. The aim of painting has always been the deterritorialization of faces and landscapes, either by a reactivation of corporeality, or by a liberation of lines or colors, or both at the same time. There are many becomings-animal, becomings-woman, and becomings-child in painting.
The problem of music is different, if it is true that its problem is the refrain. Deterritorializing the refrain, inventing lines of deterritorialization for the refrain, implies procedures and constructions that have nothing to do with those of painting (outside of vague analogies of the sort painters have often tried to establish). Again, it is not certain whether we can draw a dividing line between animals and human beings: are there not, as Messiaen believes, musicial birds and nonmusician birds? Is the bird's refrain necessarily territorial, or is it not already used for very subtle deterritorializations, for selective lines of flight? The difference between noise and sound is definitely not a basis for the distinction between musician birds and nonmusician birds. Rather, it is the labor of the refrain. Does it remain territorial and territorializing, or is it carried away in a moving block that draws a transversal across all coordinates---and all of the intermediaries between the two? Music is precisely the adventure of the refrain: the way music lapses back into a refrain; the way it lays hold of the refrain, makes it more and more sober, reduced to a few notes, then takes it down a creative line that is not so much richer, no origin or end of which is in sight...
--Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia, pp. 301-302.
Dispatches from the Class Wars
`
Dispatch one: torn from a telephone pole on Rowena Avenue:
Click to enlarge
Note: his name is not "Fangs." It's "Guru." He is not as described.
Dispatch two: from today's NYT:
~
Dispatch one: torn from a telephone pole on Rowena Avenue:
Click to enlarge
Note: his name is not "Fangs." It's "Guru." He is not as described.
° ° ° ° °
Dispatch two: from today's NYT:
Emphasis added. W
"Roberta Myers, the editor of Elle, wears Prada, but she takes the subway to work."
~
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Judgement at MoMA
~
How's that Taniguchi expansion?
~
How's that Taniguchi expansion?
When the museum [MoMA] reopened near the end of 2004, the notices were nearly all very positive, even glowing. For my part, I called the $425-million redesign "an elegant return to the museum's first principles" and praised its "architectural poise."But guess what? Art relevant to the postmillennial planet looks good in it:
But over the last couple of years, the critical tide has turned dramatically against the building. New York art critics, in particular, have savaged the Taniguchi galleries as cold and impersonal -- symbolic of what they see as the museum's conservative and increasingly corporate personality.
So what does the Serra exhibition -- and the news of Nouvel's arrival on 53rd Street, and the museum's seemingly insatiable appetite for space -- tell us about Taniguchi's MoMA? About the much analyzed relationship between art and museum architecture, and why the critics' attitudes about the building shifted so radically?Well, awk at the very last. But otherwise: very nice job, Christopher. Setting actual art in the architecture to see how the architecture works.
On the most basic level, the exhibition clarifies and works to justify the Taniguchi design. The interaction between the sculptures and the galleries here is about as effective as can be imagined. Serra's work has always flirted with architectural scale and sensibility, and the Taniguchi galleries -- politely inert containers with a remarkable sense of proportion -- do more than merely allow that flirtation to continue interrupted. They practically dim the lights, put on the Barry White and pour the drinks themselves.
The setting, moreover, seems to have inspired a new sensuality from Serra. The three new rusted-steel pieces on the second floor -- "Sequence," "Torqued Torus Inversion" and "Band," the last of which the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has acquired for its new building on Wilshire Boulevard -- contain all the machismo and sense of enveloping scale that Serra is known for. They also display a rounded, serpentine character that many critics have called feminine. Nearly 15 feet high, these new pieces are flowing, room-sized sculptures to get lost in. Walking through them, I began to think the entire show could be summed up with a five-word review: John Wayne meets Georgia O'Keeffe.
~
moleskine pour août
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Madamina: "You know why I liked that film? Because he was a bacteriologist!"
Gawu ancora: stunner walking the empty exhibit. Grad student, abundant radiant curls, lanky, ethnic dress, freckles but summer tan anyway, eyebrows shaved, clanking heels. Underfed, a sculptor; it takes forever to exhibit, forever! Has been twice too, this time came especially to look at the way the pieces drape. Wants to touch them, to see how much they move, but afraid. Me: hey, no kidding, I was wondering the same thing last week. I'll drift away and watch the guard and cough, your cue...you go girl...me: always resourceful, glad to be of use...Guard moves...finally, the touch...it's hilarious, her hand hits a support beam, no movement at all---then, frustrated, she just slaps at the piece...against her rings, it clinks like a windchime---such a sudden aggressive swipe, maybe even her tennis bracelet clinked the aluminum...Guard yells at her...exeunt to courtyard, vurrry hurriedly, laughing...mercifully, nothing fell...I audibilize my guess: El Anatsui would have probably only laughed...these are found objects, after all...
Madamina ancora: "No, I don't have time to read main-frigging-brace..."
Bird and Bee, lots of summer theme songs, e.g., There is something wrong, and there is something right....
Gawu exhibit: new favorite contemplation spot in town. But I've blown it with this guard...
~o
Madamina: "You know why I liked that film? Because he was a bacteriologist!"
° ° ° ° °
Gawu ancora: stunner walking the empty exhibit. Grad student, abundant radiant curls, lanky, ethnic dress, freckles but summer tan anyway, eyebrows shaved, clanking heels. Underfed, a sculptor; it takes forever to exhibit, forever! Has been twice too, this time came especially to look at the way the pieces drape. Wants to touch them, to see how much they move, but afraid. Me: hey, no kidding, I was wondering the same thing last week. I'll drift away and watch the guard and cough, your cue...you go girl...me: always resourceful, glad to be of use...Guard moves...finally, the touch...it's hilarious, her hand hits a support beam, no movement at all---then, frustrated, she just slaps at the piece...against her rings, it clinks like a windchime---such a sudden aggressive swipe, maybe even her tennis bracelet clinked the aluminum...Guard yells at her...exeunt to courtyard, vurrry hurriedly, laughing...mercifully, nothing fell...I audibilize my guess: El Anatsui would have probably only laughed...these are found objects, after all...
° ° ° ° °
Madamina ancora: "No, I don't have time to read main-frigging-brace..."
° ° ° ° °
Bird and Bee, lots of summer theme songs, e.g., There is something wrong, and there is something right....
° ° ° ° °
Gawu exhibit: new favorite contemplation spot in town. But I've blown it with this guard...
~o
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