Vanitas Magazine

TC: Bach's Booty

2012-01-11T05:16:00.000-08:00

Johann Sebastian Bach at age 61: Elias Gottlob Haussmann, 1748, copy or second version of painting made in 1746 (collection of William H. Scheide)

Three barrels of beer was Bach's pay. Still now
A dim shadow falls across the bright festal tone
As we follow the figured bass part down
Memory lane, where the art form's short term losses,
Simulating his disputes with authority,
Preclude the purple laurels victory brings.
Don't blow your wig, scholar. Let the beer fiddlers play
"The Warrior Minstrel of the Forlorn Hope."
Life remains long, but now and then as the silver
Chords gather and are sprinkled above the planet
Like sparks pinned to a blue velvet canopy
We get these inklings, self regard drifts away
From boreal night's cold lucid frame
Into postromantic darkness, and real stars come out.

Old man with stick leaning on a barrel: photo by Buschgens, 1943 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv)

TC: The Nelsons in San Roque

2012-01-07T05:39:00.000-08:00

San Roque hub: photo by John Wiley, 28 May 2010

Those bungalows of San Roque
so perfect yet oddly sad
(“a little wood & stucco
to keep the sun out”)
always remind me of
where the Nelson family lived
way back in the days of Hi Oz
Hi Pop Hi Rick Hi David.

Everybody in that family was Okay
every day for a whole decade.
And when Ricky turned out to be
a low rider, it was still okay.
And that’s the way it is today
among the petticoat palms
of Calle Noguera
and Puesta del Sol.

You can’t rain on the parade
of the petit bourgeois
because it doesn’t have one
except at Fiesta
when rain’s against the law.

Ricky, Harriet, David and Ozzie Nelson: photographer unknown, n.d. via lost in transmission

David, Ricky and Harriet Nelson: photographer unknown, n.d.

Lauro Canyon Reservoir and upper San Roque: photo by John Wiley, 18 April 2011

TC: Hollywood Dreaming (Gavin Lambert / Russell Lee)

2012-01-03T08:58:00.000-08:00

Young woman standing on sidewalk with suitcase, Hollywood, California: photo by Russell Lee, April 1942

Driving home, I wondered if there was anything that anyone could do about her. Could the magazines come true, and Emma Slack (with a new name) be made a star? In a way, I didn't care. With her appalling, cruel, perfect egocentricity, it was difficult to conceive of Emma helpless, Emma lost: the little figure behind the palm trees, wandering down Hollywood Boulevard, turned away from the studio gate, listening breathlessly to a retired star's useless reminiscences -- this had to be a game, a chosen role. Nobody could be as naïvely heartbreaking as that. In a few weeks' time she might have to give up the part, with her savings gone she'd take a job as a waitress or store attendant, or go back to the aunts. And it would be all over . . . In another way, I cared a little. There was a kind of fanaticism about Emma, and perhaps this made her really helpless. In a city full of dreamers, she clung with such fierceness to an obviously fragile dream. When I thought of that, she struck me as about the most impermanent person I could imagine in the world.

Sign and ticket window of a large dance palace, Hollywood, California: photo by Russell Lee, April 1942

Russell Lee photos from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress

Gavin Lambert: Dreaming Emma, from The Slide Area, 1959

“It is only a few miles’ drive to the ocean, but before reaching it I shall be nowhere. Hard to describe the impression of unreality, because it is intangible; almost supernatural; something in the air. (The air . . . Last night on the weather telecast the commentator, mentioning electrical storms near Palm Springs and heavy smog in Los Angeles, described the behavior of the air as ‘neurotic’. Of course. Like everything else the air must be imported and displaced, like the water driven along huge aqueducts from distant reservoirs, like the palm trees tilting above the mortuary signs and laundromats along Sunset Boulevard.) Nothing belongs.”

TC: John Ashbery: At North Farm

2011-12-24T07:44:00.000-08:00

La terre rouge: photo by Guy Néchois, 2007

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,

Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

At North Farm: John Ashbery, from A Wave (1984)

TC: Born-Again Christmas

2011-12-19T02:45:00.000-08:00

Red-capped Plover (Charadrius ruficapillus), Orford, Tasmania: photo by Noodle snacks, 2010

I wouldn't mind being born again as a Red-capped Plover
If I were to be born again as a Fan-tailed Cuckoo

or a Bassian Thrush

a Dusky Woodswallow
a Little Penguin
a Pink Robin
or a Superb Fairywren
I'd be on top of the world
If I were to be born again as a Bennett's Wallaby
I'd be over the moon
If I were to be born again as a Moon Jelly
a Bubble-tipped Anemone
a Venus Flytrap Anemone
or a Zebra-striped Gorgonian Wrapper
life would begin again in a new and interesting way
for I would be beautiful
This old body's is on its last legs
anyway
If it could be born again
as a Red and White Christmas Tree Worm
it would wish you a happy Christmas and be gone
into its feathery Christmas wreath in the deeps

Fan-tailed Cuckoo (Ccomantis flabelliformis), Bruny Island, Tasmania: photo by Noodle snacks, 2010

Bassian Thrush (Zoothera lunulata), Bruny Island, Tasmania : photo by Noodle snacks, 2010

A Dusky Woodswallow (Artamus cyanopterus) parent feeding chicks in a nest at Mortimer Bay, Tasmania : photo by Noodle snacks, 2010

Little Penguin (Eudyptula minor) family exiting burrow, Bruny Island, Tasmania : photo by Noodle snacks, 2010

Pink Robin (Petroica rodogaster), Mount Field National Park, Tasmania : photo by Noodle snacks, 2010

Superb Fairywren (Malurus cyaneus), Male, Peter Murrell Reserve, Tasmania : photo by Noodle snacks, 2010

Bennett's Wallaby (Maacropus rufogriseus rufogriseus), Bruny Island, Tasmania: photo by Noodle snacks, 2010I

Adult Moon Jelly (Aurelia aurita), Monterey Bay Aquarium : photo by Dante Alighieri, 2006

Bubble-Tip Anemone (Entacmaea quadricolor): photo by Nick Hobgood, 2006

Venus Flytrap Anemone (Actinoscyphia aurelia), Gulf of Mexico : photo by Aquapix and Expedition to the Deep Slope, 2007 (NOAA)

Zebra-striped Gorgonian Wrapper (Nemanthus annamensis), a type of colonial anemone : photo by Nick Hobgood, 2005

Red and white Christmas Tree Worm (Spirobranchus giganteus) photo by Nick Hobgood, 2005

TC: Paratasis

2011-12-08T04:56:00.000-08:00

Now that a blizzard of idiocy has buried the world, logic must take care of itself.

Everything that is possible at all, is also impossible.

"Goofy is Pluto" is nonsense.

It is impossible to go wrong in logic unless human beings are involved.

Any sentence that makes sense is bound to be mis-heard.

Now that logic must take care of itself, can we trust it will be clothed, warmed and fed?

Can we identify the individual signs of idiocy in the midst of a blinding snowstorm?

If the signs can no longer be made out, why is it we must have signs?

If someone were to have torn down the signs in the night, would we know the difference?

If Pluto is Goofy, it may be Pluto who has torn down the signs.

Are those glimmerings we see through the blizzard the headlights of the logical snowplows?

The turnings in the road are dangerous in zero visibility.

Pluto would never be caught dead out on a night like this without the snowshoes of logic.

Were Pluto to be found dead in a snowdrift, would Goofy be more likely to lament or to celebrate?

Can logic be attributed to a system of thought that exists in defiance of logic?

When the drifts rise to cover the tops of the buildings, will the muffled cries of Pluto continue to be heard?

Samotnia Shelter, Karpacz, Karkonosze, Poland: photo by Klapi, 2006

TC: Clean

2011-12-04T04:05:00.000-08:00

Cat cleaning itself (showing hooked papillae on tongue): photo by Jennifer Leigh, 2007

Oft turns the ageing mind to Frances
Waldman's blunt query, back seat of full taxi,
Riding downtown, that chill February,
To young Angelica: "Maybe marrying
Him seems like a good idea now, but where
Will it leave you in forty years?" Being there
Herself, she should have known: old. Low blow, Frances!
The minds of the old are dirty, dirty
With the pained truth of all those years. Old, one grows,
At least in the opinion of strangers,
Ever less loveable (fact of nature), and so,
It follows, ever less easily loved--
Yet still, old does not so easily
Surrender the capacity to love
Nor the need to be loved. If anything
These things increase as one ages, somewhat
Inconveniently let it be said.
No one young likes to think of love among
The old. Consider the film Cloud Nine
In which seventy-somethings conduct
A none-too-discreet affair: things get sloppy,
No fleshy detail's spared us. Would you
O reader, not yet superannuated,
Wish to look away? En route to dust, let us
Guard and preserve, if not our virginity
(Pace Andrew Marvell), then our privacy.
Let's not talk about dignity, only wild
Creatures get to maintain that. And of course
As I'm writing this, Smokey the cat
Fastidiously scours his private parts with
Busy tongue. Animals, unlike us, are clean.
Young, the parts that interested one
Most in books and movies were the dirty ones.

TC: Clean: from The New World, Libellum Books, 2009

TC: I Was Born To Speak Your Name

2011-11-30T06:11:00.000-08:00

I knew the tune
It was my song
Even before you came along
Yet only then did I perceive its meaning

This you I wished for
This desired Other of whom
I spoke so glowingly in poems
I never knew its name

When I lifted its arms up
I noticed tiny wings
That’s all I knew
The rest was Muselike
Anonymous this “you”

So I guess those poems
Were like phonecalls to the future
I think I had your number
Knew what I was looking for
Even before I found it
In the face directory

And luckiest of all
Your human substance
Was life’s loveliest
Far as I could see

As if I’d placed
Bones and skin
Together in a dream
You were put together that way
But I wouldn’t let it go to my head if I were you

The Muse Inspiring the Poet: Henry Rousseau, 1909 (Kunstmuseum Basel)

TC: Walter Benjamin: A Map of Hell (1938)

2011-11-20T21:31:00.000-08:00

Paradise and Hell: Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1510 (Museo del Prado, Madrid)

March 6. On recent nights I've had dreams that remained deeply engraved in my day. Last night I dreamed I had company. Friendly things came my way; I believe they consisted primarily in women taking an interest in me -- indeed, even commenting favorably upon my appearance. I think I remember remarking aloud that now I probably wouldn't live much longer -- as if this were the last display of friendship among people bidding one another farewell.

Plique-à-jour enamel setting, cloisonné enamel on gold: Guillaume Julien [?], Paris, late 13th/early 14th century: Musée National du Moyen Age, Paris (image by Jastrow, 2006)

Later, just before I awoke, I was in the company of a lady in Adrienne Monnier's rooms. They were the setting for an exhibition of objects which I can't quite recall. Among them were books with miniatures, as well as plates and intricately wrought arabesques which were colorfully overlaid as if with enamel. The rooms were on the ground floor facing the street, from which one could look in through a large windowpane. I was on the inside. My lady had obviously already treated her teeth according to the technique that the exhibition was advertising.

Front of dental office "Next Appointment" notice, advertising Chlorodont toothpaste: VEB Elbe-Chemie, 1969 (Archiv der Firma Dental-Kosmetik GmbH und Co KG, Nachfolgerin der Leowerke und späteren VEB Elbe-Chemie; image by Freak1972, 2010)

She had polished them to an opalescent shine. The color of her teeth ran to dull green and blue. I took pains to make her understand most politely that this was not the correct use of the product. Anticipating my thoughts, she pointed out that the inner surfaces of her teeth were inlaid in red. I had indeed meant to say that, for teeth, the brightest colors are scarcely bright enough.

Toothpaste with wood-texturing: Blender3D image by SoylentGreen, 2006

I've been suffering greatly from the noise in my room.

Wood-Texture, Band type: Blender3D image by SoylentGreen, 2006

Last night my dream recorded this.

Looping Particle Fire: Blender3D image by SoylentGreen, 2006

I found myself standing in front of a map and, simultaneously, standing in the landscape which it depicted. The landscape was terrifyingly dreary and bare; I couldn't have said whether its desolation was that of a rocky wasteland or that on an empty ground populated only by capital letters. These letters writhed and curved upon their terrain as if following mountain ranges; I knew or learned that I was in the labyrinth of my auditory canal. But the map was, at the same time, a map of hell.

The Hollywood Sign, shot from an aircraft: photo by Jelson, 2009

Walter Benjamin: Diary Entries, 1938 (excerpt), translated by Gerhard Richter and Michael W. Jennings in Selected Writings, Volume 3 (1935-1938), 2002

TC: Walter Benjamin: Cult

2011-11-16T06:36:00.000-08:00

Still-life with Rarities: Jan van der Heyden, 1712 (Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest)

A religion may be discerned in capitalism -- that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.

We cannot draw closed the net in which we are caught...

Vanitas still-life: Harmen Steenwijck, c. 1640 (National Gallery, London)

Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. In capitalism, things have a meaning only in their relationship to the cult; capitalism has no specific body of dogma, no theology. It is from this point of view that utilitarianism acquires its religious overtones.

The Carrot: Willem Frederik van Royen, 1699 (Märkisches Museum, Berlin)

This concretization of cult is connected with a second feature of capitalism: the permanence of the cult. Capitalism is the celebration of a cult sans rêve et sans merci. There are no "weekdays." There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshiper.

Hunting still-life: Willem von Aelst, c. 1665 (private collection)

And third, the cult makes guilt pervasive. Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement. In this respect, this religious system is caught up in the headlong rush of a larger movement. A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind, so as once and for all to include God in the system of guilt and thereby awaken in Him an interest in the process of atonement. This atonement cannot then be expected from the cult itself, or from the reformation of this religion (which would need to be able to have recourse to some stable element in it), or even from the complete renouncement of this religion.

Vanitas still-life: Harmen Steenwijck, c. 1640 (Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden)

The nature of the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end, to the point where God, too, finally takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe is taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope. Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. God's transcendence is at an end. But he is not dead; he has been incorporated into human existence. This passage of the planet "Human" through the house of despair in the absolute loneliness of his trajectory is the ethos that Nietzsche defined. This man is the superman, the first to recognize the religion of capitalism and bring it to fulfillment.

Portrait of a woman: Bartolomeo Veneto, 1520-1525 (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt)

Its fourth feature is that its God must be hidden from it and may be addressed only when his guilt is at its zenith. This cult is celebrated before an unmatured deity; every idea, every conception of it offends against the secret of this immaturity.

The Seven Deadly Sins (detail: Superbia, or Pride): Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1480 (Museo del Prado, Madrid)

Freud's theory, too, belongs to the hegemony of the priests of this cult. Its conception is capitalist through and through. By virtue of a profound analogy, which has still to be illuminated, what has been repressed, the idea of sin, is capital itself, which pays interest on the hell of the unconscious.

Thérèse Dreaming: Balthus, 1938 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

The paradigm of capitalist religious thought is magnificently formulated in Nietzsche's philosophy. The idea of the superman transposes the apocalyptic "leap" not into conversion, atonement, purification, and penance, but into an apparently steady, though in the final analysis explosive and discontinuous intensification. For this reason, intensification and development in the sense of non facit saltum are incompatible. The superman is the man who has arrived where he is without changing his ways; he is historical man who has grown up right through the sky. This breaking open of the heavens that was and is characterized (even for Nietzsche himself) by guilt in a religious sense was anticipated by Nietzsche. Marx is a similar case: the capitalism that refuses to change course becomes socialism by means of the simple and compound interest that are functions of Schuld (consider the demonic ambiguity of this word).

Count Willem II presides over the execution of the dishonest bailiff, 1336: Nicolaes von Galen, 1657 (Town Hall, Hasselt)

Capitalism is a religion of pure cult, without dogma.

Capitalism has developed as a parasite of Christianity in the West (this must be shown not just in the case of Calvinism, but in the other orthodox Christian churches), until it reached the point where Christianity's history is essentially that of its parasite -- that is to say, of capitalism.

Count Willem II presides over the execution of the dishonest bailiff, 1336 (detail): Nicolaes von Galen, 1657 (Town Hall, Hasselt)

sans rêve et sans merci=without dream or mercy
non facit saltum=he cannot make the leap
Schuld=debt; guilt

Capitalism as Religion (fragment): Walter Benjamin, 1921, edited excerpt (translation by Rodney Livingstone in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, 1996)

TC: A Meditation Outside the Fertile Grounds Cafe

2011-11-14T11:57:00.000-08:00

Ayman just came back from his family
Home in the West Bank. How's the spirit there?
I asked. "Good. Nobody's giving up."
Ayman paused, wiping down the spotless glass top
Of the pastry case one more careful time
Without looking up. Thinking to himself.
"After all, all they want's a little justice."
On the map of the West Bank, that blank space
Just to the left of the town of Bhiddu
Is the village where Ayman's father, one
Of twenty children, was born and raised.
The name of the village means House of Stones
"Because there's a quarry there," but still
It's too small to rate a spot on the map in
The Economist, alongside this story
On the fresh welling up of blood and anger
In my friend's home land, that blank space
Filled with blood and stones. Ayman loves
His trade; in six years he's built from nothing
The coolest little coffee shop on the street;
People like him, he likes them; he makes
Great coffee, his sandwiches are famed, justly;
It's the old American Horatio
Alger Dream, and America's his country.
Every day he gets hundreds of calls
On his cell phone. "But know how many
Calls from people here I take when I'm back
Home?" he smiles. "None. I talk to people
There." And when he goes back home to Beit
Duqqu, America feels far away.
That's the way it feels to me too, but I have
No other home. The photo of the olive tree,
Its roots exposed from the bulldozer cut,
That was up on Ayman's wall last autumn --
Is that a photo of a broken home
Or is it that one's home's always intact
In one's mind as long as one's heart is
Full? I wouldn't begin to know. Tacked
On a phone pole out front of Fertile Grounds
In drifting night mist, a tattered poster
With a picture of a cat's face on it, lost
Near Delaware and Shattuck. It's Momo.
And what's become of poor Momo, now a week
Gone? Tonight, caning into the fog,
I hallucinated a Momo
Sighting downtown. No, just another feral.
Over ferals few sentimental
Tears are shed. A shelter's not a home.
A sanctuary's what everybody needs
These days -- the ferals, the street and doorway
People, the drifters in the mist, the bums.
On my way back, as I passed, I saw that
A young Arab girl in headscarf sat weeping
At a table outside Fertile Grounds. Ayman
In his counterman's apron, spick and span,
And Mohamed stood huddled in conference,
Mo holding a cell phone. "She's just lost
Her family, everything," Mo said softly.
"She doesn't have people here. I am
Going to help her." Ayman was talking
To the girl in Arabic, serious, hushed.
Then too Mo, in Arabic, reassuring.
"Don't worry, it will be okay," said Mo --
Switching back to Shattuck Avenue English
For me, the infidel. God is great. May
God bring Momo home if it is His will,
And everybody else along with him,
Whomever that may include -- we, living --
And we'll abide in that, and till then hope
That Momo too, pilfering out of the trash
Bins behind the Shattuck eateries,
Will abide likewise. He'll not lack competition.

from TC: The New World (Libellum, 2009)

TC: Penmanship

2011-11-13T08:54:00.000-08:00

If I were Sophocles, brave with truth

I would play my old fiddle a sharp tune or two

And then withdraw into the uniqueness of rock

Which your special penmanship changes into lock

For your l’s are special, as in Elgin Penitentiary

Where you have never been, my expressive farmer

Preferring liberty to freedom or a penitentiary

The baroque swoop in your l’s is for enhancing liking

I like you because I am mad at you

Often you are mad at me too

All very spectacular

But it’s awful when the other person isn’t breathing

Friendship tempts you to essay the r in rock while breathing

Your friend Rock likes you

Jean

Frank

Paul

Matthew

Joy

Austin

And people

Like that

Like you

Goya is a tremendous painter

Goya is dead

But the poetry of penmanship is never dead

While you are writing

We survive for a while, and then we die

And this is but the beginning

Your d pirouettes then later you die

But there is no reason for you to care about any of that

For you have become the virtuoso of capital F

Even if tomorrow we die

I am still free to go on choosing whomever I like

I go on choosing you

And you go on choosing me

Over and over again

Irrespective of merit

Spencerian script: D.L. Musselman, 1884

Classic Pelikan fountain pen with inkwell: Lothar Spurzem, 2006

German class-book, manufactured by Langenkämper-Verlag: photo by Moritz Hector, 2009

Dip pen with nib, 1925: image by EraserGirl, 2008

Cursive script, 1894: image by Arpingstone, 2005

TC: James Schuyler: Salute

2011-11-08T07:10:00.000-08:00

Unidentified Asteraceae, Death Valley National Park: photo by Mila Zinkova, 2005

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

James Schuyler: from Salute, 1960

Wildflowers, Death Valley National Park: photo by Mila Zinkova, 2005

TC: Boats

2011-11-07T08:31:00.000-08:00

All the inconsequential memoria
Seeping into the monody: voyages,
Purposes, cargos, ports of call whose names,

Long since forgot, returned to him in dreams
Only to be forgot again by morning --
Supposing those were really dreams, and this morning.

Boat and Grain Elevators No. 2: Ralston Crawford, 1942 (The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.)

LIVE FROM THE LIVING THEATRE: Updates from #OccupyWallStreet!

2011-10-24T06:44:00.000-07:00

- The Occupation has been a success! and the power of the people has prevailed, including those in authority who resisted the temptation of acting oppressively and violently, and allowed the occupants to stay on October 14th, backing away from their demand the protestors leave Zucatti Park.

This video is a STUNNING example of what is happening, from the 14th.

Watch the man in the green pushed by a policeman on the right side of the screen 12 seconds in, and the guy in blue reach to catch him. Then watch one policeman wildly swinging his baton at 20 seconds into it, so much so he hits another police man with his baton swinging without discretion.

BUT then a courageous woman in red hair comes in from the bottom left corner, and uses peace to over power three police men and keep the peace. It is truly one of the most incredible individual acts of pacifism in action that we have seen in this movement and it is its back bone. She also helped the police keep the situation under control by doing so: (90 seconds long total):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6tboOENXtU

- Occupy Wall Street Occupies Times Square! At 2:30 into this one, a man yelling, "OH MY GOD, THEY'VE SHUT DOWN TIMES SQUARE!!" (8 mins total)

For those who care about schools and education, checkout what Sarah has to say at 6:52.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwYaBpxledo&feature=player_embedded

Also see this article about 350 Columbia Professors signing a document in support of the protest (article one page):

http://occupywallst.org/forum/news-almost-350-columbia-professors-have-signed-a-/

- President Obama, at the unveiling of Martin Luther King Jr. statue, says MLK would have backed the movement. See the following Washington Times article(one page):

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/oct/16/obama-king-would-have-backed-occupy-wall-street/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

- From Zucatti Park on the 14th to Times Square on saturday, PHENOMENAL FOOTAGE(5 mins).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =75KHM4uvctA&sns=em

- The Living Theatre performance at Washington Square Park October 8th, after the first general assembly held there. Attached is the script we use, for those interested in participating. Please change it, use it, put your logo on it, talk about your projects, keep up the dialogue this movement has started. Also, let us know if you are involved so we can keep you up to date and include you in the Occupy Your World performance festival. Also attached is Judith's essay on Modern Political Theatre that will be published in her book next spring: (5 minutes)

http://vimeo.com/30714057

- On going discussions are happening about occupations in many places, by many different groups all over the world. Here is the video from the Offical NYCGA.CC website explaining the process and how to be involved:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dtD8RnGaRQ&feature=player_embedded

The Occupation is currently discussing the occupation of Washington Square Park and the NYU student body has already offered to share their meal plans with the occupants should they try for this. The Occupation is currently discussing the occupation of Washington Square Park and the NYU student body has already offered to share their meal plans with the occupants should this happen.

- Representing 64 countries and tens of thousands of artists around the world, from IETM Congress:(2 mins)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6QcL0fslQU&feature=player_embedded

Also, encouragingly, The VIllage Voice Obies responded in support as well, and posted on their facebook page!

This is our first attempt at a worldwide social and cultural dialogue for almost 50 years. We need everyone to help maintain the peace. Follow along, and say your piece, whatever it is. Everyone is upset, and we all have the same problem. No one's needs are any greater than anyone else's.

Let's get to work solving our problems.

Spread the word!!!

Love from The Living,

Brad

The Living Theatre

TC: Ticky Tacky

2011-10-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

Surf-Riders, Honolulu: Charles W. Bartlett, 1919 (Honolulu Academy of Arts)

Life should have enough arresting moments
to create at least a tropism in Xanadu

between the bamboo swizzle sticks
and the sarongs soaked in lizard spittle

revolving ceiling fans banana trees
birds of paradise and pineapple daiquiris

but little is expected by those who
dwell in the environs of the lawn bowling court

for them it is a perennial Mondo Samarkanda
a pointed tin roof above cute wood shingles

the ghost of Reagan bumbling through the palms
amid a sunset out of Papua New Guinea

like a great snork bird homing in on orange juice

The Surf-Rider, Hawaii: Charles W. Bartlett, 1921 (Honolulu Academy of Arts)

TC: Little Bang

2011-10-14T01:34:00.000-07:00

Big Bang: NASA animation conceptualizing the beginnings of the universe

The night was hot and heavy and a hazed arc
Flared from the dark rising lamp city
The way a star might ignite above the banks
Of some unlit river, wasting on objects
More revelation than they are worth
To those who dwell and toil amid the ruins

At the witching hour, now, there’s little bang
Left to shrink from, nothing much, just these same blank
Vistas, all lost, receding, much as the man
On the Jupiter mission got littler
And littler, so too we, older, grow closer
To other spheres than to that earth we recall

Mel 111, open cluster in Coma Berenices: astronomical simulation by Roberto Mura

TC: Humility

2011-10-07T02:00:00.000-07:00

"Oh, don't hurt me! cried Tom. I only want to look at you; you are so handsome": Jessie Willcox Smith, in Charles Kingsley: The Water Babies, 1916 (Library of Congress)

There are a great many things in the world which you never heard of; and a great many more which nobody ever heard of; the picture of happiness which you harbor is steeped through and through in the time which the course of your own existence has conferred on you; and this could equally be a picture of unhappiness; and you would never know it.

An underwater shot looking up at a palm tree and clouds distorted by the ripples on the surface: photo by Bryan Calloway, 4 November 2010

TC: The Last Poem (after Robert Desnos)

2011-09-25T04:24:00.000-07:00

Night Shadows: Edward Hopper, 1921

I’ve dreamed so much of you
Walked so much
Talked so much made love to your shadow
So much that there’s nothing left of you
What is left
Of me is a shadow
Among shadows but 100
Times more shadowy than the rest
A shadow that will come
To rest
In your life in which the sun
Is so much.

TC: The Dream of Constantine

2011-09-05T06:25:00.000-07:00

Parhelion or "sun dog" [similar to that said to have been seen in the "vision" or "dream" of the Emperor Constantine I, on the eve of his victory over Maxentius, 312 CE]: photo by M. Metz, 23 September 2005

To Constantine in the constant cañon of his morbid discontent
Vision distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion
Guarded conspiracies in the family, rebellion bruited, haystacks aflame at the borders
The latest hue and cry from the provinces fading into the din of background noise
The breakdown of communications with the common people,
The haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the wincing shame of the general decay
Across the great breadth of the subject lands, not in his imperial tent alone --

Or again, later, the epidemic of lamentation about the way life was lived now --
The disputes among the wizards, the coins thrown down upon the marble tiles,
The relentless advance of barbarian industry at the exposed frontiers,
The news that the knights sent out to explore the ruins had not been heard from,
That shadows were lengthening across the paved courtyard, even as day was expected to
Be coming on -- the troublous murmurings, the brazen trumpeting from the stables --
To the good ruler once seen banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten,
At the jolly reunion, none of this would have needed to be explained --

So that the attacks of insomnia which had become ever more frequent with the years
Were now no longer interrupted by the brief welcome respites of fitful slumber --
And the cold night wind, another sign, turning back the light of the stars
So that the victims could not make out the astronomical figures on the bills of accounting, this too --
And the light of the stars turning up again on the night wind,

Blowing out over the dark mountains, across the vast lost stretches of the subdued continents
Which must now be left to the helpless ones, the hapless inheritors,
To whom the empty words, without the experiences to which they had once referred,
Could mean less than nothing -- mere words, so plainly useless against the fates --
The relentless advance also of memories of the poisoned son, the wife left to boil in her bath -- and
Other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain --

All of this occurred exactly as had been written.

Legend of the True Cross -- the Dream of Constantine: Piero della Francesca, c. 1452-1456, San Francesco, Arezzo

Marble head of the Colossus of Constantine: Roman, c. 313-324 CE, recovered from the west apse of the Basilica of Maxentius, 1487; Capitoline Museums, Rome (image by Jean-Christophe Benoist, 3 August 2007)

TC: Mirror Traffic

2011-08-20T08:08:00.000-07:00

Mirror Traffic: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, produced by Beck Hansen, cover art by Tom Clark, Matador Records, release date 23 August 2011

TC: Ideology

2011-08-03T05:57:00.000-07:00

Ideology dates back to the veldt,
Blood in the dust, the lion's rage against
The antelope it's about to have for lunch.
For the luckless prey prayer's all that's left,
No ideology's yet been known to incorporate
Mercy as a feature. But of course all this is irony.
No lion's yet been known to subscribe to a noble lie.

The Hungry Lion Throws Itself upon the Antelope: Henri Rousseau, 2005 (Fondation Bieler, Basel)
Lioness hunting warthogs in the western corridor of the Serengeti: photo by Schuyler Shepherd, 2009

TC: Footsteps

2011-07-05T03:08:00.000-07:00

Intersection (downtown Vancouver): photo by Evan Leeson, 3 August 2009

Some crisis of a ruthless order

Must have driven us all off into our warrens

Of private dilemma and compensation

In subjective device, dressed up as

Lifestyle I don’t doubt given the rue

With which if not to seem even greater

Fools we must look back upon a protracted

Adolescence, squeezed into corner pockets

The knowledge of the subject becomes

Actual just at the moment there’s this

Hollow sound of knocking at the door

Followed by footsteps of some singular

Person withdrawing on his or her own

Into whatever constitutes the future

TC: "flat round..."

2011-06-17T07:54:00.000-07:00

Tropaeolum majus: photo by Michael Gaspert, 2005

flat round
nasturtium top
plate leaves with
gleaming pin
head size beads
of last night's
rain water still
balanced on
them

pushed up
on long thin
green stems to
white morning

Tropaeolum majus: photo by Viola Sonans, 2005

TC: Old Mine Road (Caribou)

2011-05-13T12:53:00.000-07:00

Bear Lake (Colorado): photo by Trojan, 2004

Just below timberline

life bursts in

where water was
it's mostly mossy

with willows
and dark spaces

and wild daisies
and mazes of glades

and pools

Lilly Lake (Colorado): photo by Trojan, 2004

TC: "the bits break loose..."

2011-05-09T05:17:00.000-07:00

Two dandelion seeds (Taraxacum sect. Ruderalia): photo by Joergmoritz, 30 May 2006

the bits break loose
to scatter in the wind

of what once was
rising falling drifting

moments in the sun
disappearing into thin air

one by one
and it's never done

but it radiates around
and it radiates around

Pinus thunbergii: photo by Joergmoritz, 30 May 2006

TC: On the Playing Fields

2011-04-11T02:55:00.001-07:00

Sunset: photo by andrew pmk, 2005

Cold clear days with a kind of white haze
The eternity of thought against
The momentariness of sensation shows
Separation is all there is left to
Enact as the sky of evening closes
On each strained thud of a weary puppet heart
The calm that nature breathes grows large
Colors of an insect’s wing on pale clouds
Serrated and recessive barred
A vapor trail cuts across a star’s reflex
While eastward others now begin to sparkle
And as on the playing fields night conquers
The moon floats up cloaked in misty vagary
The blood aswarm with imagined lights

Mount Carleton panorama: photo by andrew pmk, 2005

TC: Blur/Lens

2011-03-02T15:14:00.000-08:00

The "I" and the eye

A glass for seeing
Always cloudy

The days go by
The world spins round
The subject is always moving
The mind can't keep up
It's all a blur
The eye and the "I"
A glass for seeing
Always cloudy

Every two hours I wipe off my glasses

Colorful blur created by moving subject, moving camera and 1/13 second exposure: photo by Robert Lawton, 2006
Golden Gate Bridge refracted in rain drops acting as lenses: photo by Mila Zinkova, 2007
Magnifying and light collecting effect of a drop of oil on a glass plate held a short distance above a text: photo by Roger McLassus, 2005

TC: Multiple Screen Window Display

2011-02-18T06:28:00.000-08:00

Like so many tiny pixie tv's
Flashing messages to each other all night
The hundred billion neurons in your brain
Replace identity as such with deep
Cosmic gossip while your body's arrested
in mid flight back toward an old savannah --
A hundred billion neurons seeking shelter,
Losing that deep self because you're asleep,
Lost in your dreams, a functional state
Of your brain lapsing into disappearance,
Your brain not bothering to compute you,
Your sense of who you are going up in smoke,
Though if the soul be several not one
There's only now and that now has presence.

Windows: Charles Sheeler, c. 1952 (Hirschl and Adler Galleries, New York)

TC: A Diary

2011-02-05T01:23:00.000-08:00

Thurs. a.m. Headache mental insensibility heaviness oppressed. That acid feeling.

Tues. extremely late. Few improvements no advancements. Citizen of no nation. Stupefaction, shortness of breath & c.

Sat. night, call it morning. Done nothing need of doing pressing time of doing short.

Mon. Sounds, late. Little mice if I am not wrong. Or something. (Cats hear this.)

Sun. Day of darkening drips then night. Indolence indifference. Mind encumbered. No plan pursued or formed. Want of rest. Nor ad nor product.

Tues. Survey past life many faults many deficiencies much to be repented very little reformed. Time not expected to be long. Dark stain shadowed ceiling.

Wed. Misspent time infirmity of body perturbation of mind. As ever, tea. When p and ~p have a common boundary.

Sat. Seventieth year. Mandrill. What can be done ought not to be delayed. Delayed reaction. Left the p out of swimming. It is NOT ENOUGH to point to ~p's lying outside p. Relentless peaks & valleys & c. Whereas p and ~p have a common boundary. Already presupposing the existence of a whole world of propositions.

Thurs. Again. As before.

Sat. after long unquiet and perplexing thoughts. Thoughts not my thoughts ways not my ways much to be done little to be known. Unprofitable and dangerous enquiries. Curious doubts impossible to be solved.

Mon. too late.

Obverse fog Tues. early. Stood silent on the iron trellised balcony crept over by shining white flies.

A GREAT MEMORIAL NEARS COMPLETION: Life, 09/30/1940
Your engine makes this much acid every day: Boris Artzybasheff, Life, 04/30/1951
Now -- All America can have JESTS: Life, 09/30/1940
Do you ever awaken like this at night?: Time, 08/17/1953
Appointment in Electronia...: Life, 12/20/1943
angry young computer: Newsweek, 10/12/1964
His wife is right... the blowout wrecked the party!: Time, 08/17/1953
ELECTRONIC "FINGERS" to speed up today's automation!: Life, 06/24/1957
Why we chose the NCR computer: Time, 2/23/1962
(All images via Graphic Design Gallery Labs)

This post dedicated to Angelica

TC: Vincent Katz: An Old Song Made New

2010-12-04T12:11:00.000-08:00

On the porch at the Mississippi John Hurt Museum, Avalon, Mississippi: photo by Matt Lancashire, 2007

to Angelica and Tom

Listening, summer finally, to a new singer
Sing an old song, first heard when
The world was young
Everything was morning

Friend brought that song a long way
Played through an apparatus
No one then yet knew
Friend to me and to you

Then we sat there listening
Thought of other friend on porch
That song was heard together
In a dream almost now it seems

July 31, 2009
Solebury

TC: Wallace Stevens: The Snow Man

2010-11-24T02:59:00.000-08:00

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The Snow Man: Wallace Stevens, 1921, from Harmonium, 1923

Cat dancing in snow: photo by Matthias Zirngibl, 2006

TC: Feeling for the Ground

2010-11-11T04:47:00.000-08:00

MV Pasha Bulker grounded on Nobby's Beach, near Newcastle (Australia): photo by Web107, 2007

At first, and perhaps for a very long time, I existed as if at sea, drifting, and did not know what if anything lay under me.

Then came a change.

When my elders named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and vaguely grasped that that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out.

I glimpse myself in baby photos, attending curiously to such sounds, pensive, ignorantly wondering.

It all comes back to me now.

Adrift in my wordless sea, I was trying to read their minds, as if feeling for the ground.

What did they mean, when they uttered these strange sounds?

Their intention was shown by their bodily movements: the expression of their faces, the play of their eyes, the movement of other parts of their bodies, and, especially, the tones of their voices; which, I dimly now perceived, expressed their states of mind in seeking, having, or rejecting something.

In this way, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learned to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.

It was then I began to have a feeling for the ground. I walked a great deal, mostly alone, perhaps mostly on a hill, or then again it may have been a small mountain. Certainly it seemed solid enough.

As the scenery passed by, I could now put words to it; there was a sense of dwarf mastery in this; the achievements of the mind have their own satisfactions. However minor, however transitory.

But before very much more time had passed, I realized I retained a powerful longing for the open sea from which I had come.

This feeling of longing has remained with me to this day.

Glaucous gull (Larus hyperboreus): photo by Alastair Rae. 2005

from: Tom Clark: Feeling for the Ground (BlazeVox, 2010)

TC: Waitress

2010-11-06T07:05:00.000-07:00

Waitress serving at restaurant counter while wearing Halloween chicken costume, Leroy's Restaurant, Monrovia, California: photo by Ross Berteig, 2002

Not under pressure of a private grief,
Oh for but a few years yet of useful

Life, for all's complete once your rat
Race is run, that's how things go, no one prescribes to

Or gets to presume to order life
Around as though it were a sort of waitress race

Sister Life has better things to do than wait
Around in the wings for her part

In the next act of your however
Interesting meditative history

Mason's Cafe: truck driver, sailor and waitress at highway coffee shop on US 90 in Southern Louisiana: photo by John Vachon, 1943 (Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

TC: Vanitas Goes to the Movies

2010-10-25T06:56:00.000-07:00

Shoveling snow away from the movie entrance, Chilicothe, Ohio: photo by Arthur Rothstein, February 1940

Entrance to a movie house, Beale Street, Memphis, Tennessee: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, October 1939

Front of movie theatre, San Antonio, Texas: photo by Russell Lee, March 1939

Movie theatre, Saginaw, Michigan: photo by John Vachon, August 1941

Children at a movie house on Sunday, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: photo by Jack Delano, January 1941

The movie theatre of Escalante, Utah: photo by Dorothea Lange, April 1936

Movie theatre, Romney, West Virginia: photo by John Vachon, March 1938

Movie theatre, Moore Haven, Florida: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, January, 1939

Children and farmers waiting to go into movie on Saturday afternoon, Littleton, New Hampshire: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, March 1939 or March 1940

Mexican man in front of movie theatre, San Antonio, Texas: photo by Russell Lee, March 1939

Photos from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

TC: Double Feature

2010-10-18T05:56:00.000-07:00

After the moon goes down, the nearness of the night, fair
And dark in its standing against the remaining trees,
Comes off as not an embellishment
But a facsimile. Where have I seen this evening before.
Past is past. It is no longer the small town nineteen forties.
But living in the moment is postponed by
This uncanny sense of repetition.
For example, at the filling station
On the corner outside the theatre,
Beneath violet neon, near green garbage cans
And racks of bright red cans of motor oil, and rows of whitewalls
Stacked for sale, a young man in blue overalls pumps
Gas, over and over, in my mental reproduction of this scene,
Remembered from a foggy night on Pico, Santa Monica,
1951. Sometimes images will never leave your mind.
It's as though you were merely the carrier pigeon
For messages of unknown origin, to be delivered over and over.
As when, after a long day of construction
And assembly, the factory worker and the apprentice escort,
Having put workaday cares aside for a rare night out
At the movies, sitting rapt through the double feature,
Shyly holding hands, turn to one another at last
And sigh, and one whispers to the other,
In a tone of concession gentler than the soft summer night wind,
This is where we came in.

The new movie house in Greensboro, Greene County, Georgia: photos by Jack Delano, June 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

TC: Ray Milland: An Unnoticeable Star

2010-10-07T02:25:00.000-07:00

Just another pretty face
but behind that blank
and vapid mask
a supercilious nonchalance
with just a faint
undercurrent of malice

A safecracker hiding his
whiskey bottles in the chandelier

Something disturbing

yet horribly true about

his mixture of extreme
irritation and disbelief
with almost gentlemanly disgust

Something about reality

Ray Milland couldn't stand

Ray Milland, from the film A Life of Her Own (1950): screenshots by Thirdship, 2008

TC: Punctum

2010-10-04T00:45:00.000-07:00

Hot spring, Leirhnjúkur, Iceland: photo by Andreas Tile, 1996

A point is fixed at the
intersection between the
personal and the rest

of the cosmos, and that
nexus is the source
of the flood of speech

the desperate polyphony
of conflicting meanings
empties continually into,

all signs condensed into
a single line leading
out from this dust mote sized

fraction of the history of
a very tiny star into the
silence everywhere around it

Wolf 359, the orange object just above the center of the image, a red dwarf star located in the constellation Leo 7.8 light years from earth, one of the faintest and lowest-mass stars known, with a photosphere temperature low enough for chemical compounds to form and survive: astrophotograph by Klaus Hohmann, 2006

TC: The Headless Woman (Mistress of the Labyrinth)

2010-09-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

She runs over something in the road, perhaps a dog, or was it something else, a child?

A death is at the center of the labyrinth.

Persephone drives on, into the suddenly pelting rain.

At the center of the labyrinth, shocked, in a fog, in her car, becoming the mistress of the underworld. Her domain now the kingdom of ghosts.

"The house is full of the dead -- ignore them and they will leave," mumbles her demented mother, who is perhaps Demeter.

Argentine director Lucrecia Martel's film is a dream of disembodiment, drifting in and out of focus. Back and forth across the shadowland between death and life.

At Knossos, in Minoan Crete, Persephone, the mistress of the underworld, presided over the ritual enactment. A roofless dancing ground was spoken of as "the labyrinth".

A dry arroyo that is suddenly flooded with a confusion of memory.

To all the gods honey, reads a tablet inscription at the foot of a female figure at Knossos. To the mistress of the labyrinth, honey.

Karl Kerenyi tells us that to the Minoans, honey was equated with divine blood. The ritual gift.

I remembered the haunting images of this film as if viewing through a clouded glass scenes from another life.

Classical Seven-Circuit Labyrinth: image by James Jen, 2009
Persephone Cnidus, c. 330 B.C., found at Baiae, Campania: photo by Jastrow, 2006 (British Museum, London)
Lucrecia Martel, director of The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza): photo via The Auteurs, 2008

TC: Edwin Denby: Sonnet: "Disorder, mental, strikes me"

2010-09-14T06:27:00.000-07:00

Disorder, mental, strikes me; I

Slip from my pocket Dante to
Chance hit a word, a friend’s reply
In this bar; bare, dark avenue
The lunge of headlights, then bare dark
Cross on red, two blocks home, old Sixth
The alive, the dead, answer, ask
Miracle consciousness I’m with
At home cat chirps, Norwegian sweater
Slumped in the bar, I mind Dante
As dawn enters the sunk city
Answer a one can understand
Actual events are obscure
Though the observers appear clear

Edwin Denby: "Disorder, mental, strikes me": from Later Sonnets in The Complete Poems, 1986

125th Street, Uptown New York City: photos by Walter Payton, April 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

TC: The Great Sphinx

2010-07-01T03:34:00.000-07:00

The great Sphinx who rests solemn and enigmatic with paws folded across
his beauteous white breast

Mister Twister who astonishingly back-flexes his neck as if upon a swivel so
as the better to rearward gaze with benign wondering eyes

Old Cow able to jump over the moony night at will

Big Panda nuzzling shyly with snout and head butts and bumps reserved for those he loves

Big Bounder who comes running and leaps headlong upon tables and through doorways

Snowy Belly Boy who gazes at you blinking as if from another world

Big Penguin whose excellent black and white coat is made more splendid by careful grooming
and whose intricate and industrious pedicures are a thing of joy

Moonface Boy whose large round head contains sublunar thoughts sly and ever fleeting

Society Boy who always wants to keep his friends company and whose friends
never want to say goodbye

Doing his thing (tuxedo cat): photo by YvetteAL, 2009

TC: Mnemonic

2010-06-02T07:04:00.000-07:00

If on the moon palace stairs
A thin wash of water colour bleeding

Across the body chemistry frontier blurs,
As traffic slowly hones the blade of evening

And scatters its eyes across dusk's drift and growth,
That sharp outline we think of as reality,

It would perhaps be time to go to Plan B --
That is, to try to remember the colours of the morning.

Udaipur: Charles W. Bartlett, 1916 (Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts)
Taj Mahal, Sunset: Charles W. Bartlett, 1920 (Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts)

TC: Pink Trees

2010-05-14T06:29:00.000-07:00

The message erupts each springtime
What we do know we don't know till we know it
Has slipped away through the airy spring branches
To drift up in thin grains through the gray-white sky
And here on the blue clay earth below it
Down a yellow Spanish East Bay hillside flow
The pink trees

Pink Trees: Selden Connor Gile, 1919

TC: Curve

2010-05-12T00:06:00.000-07:00

The money

value

of

art

will keep

rising

because the

value

of

money

will keep

falling

Máscara de Xiuhtecuhtli: representation of Xiuhtecuhtli (Lord Turquoise), Central Mexican god of fire. Mosaic of turquoise inlay and other materials. Mixtec-Aztec, c. 1400-1521: photo by Manuel Parada López de Corselas, 2007 (British Museum, London)

For the Love of God: sculpture by Damien Hirst, 2007. Platinum cast of a human skull covered with 8,601 diamonds. Displayed at White Cube Gallery, London, asking price 50 million pounds. Copyright Damien Hirst, 2007 (photo via Daily Telegraph)

"... the desire incarnate in money offered a reward to the imagination, as between two lovers; and that reward seemed at first to be guaranteed by rare and beautiful metals, of whose inner nature and capacity men could only dream. In time, that guarantee was unveiled as only the projected authority of a community... It was the community that authorised the wishes expressed in money or frustrated them. To use money was to submit to the state, and when states disintegrated their moneys vanished as completely as their laws..." James Buchan, Frozen Desire: Macmillan, London, 1997

TC: Paradiso Terrestre

2010-04-28T19:45:00.000-07:00

We have always been here

It was always ours

words not as signs but as powers

of suggestion

this is paradise

in the present tense

no seconds no

minutes no hours

no distance between

object and expression

what is seen or heard

felt in the same moment

by the one who sees and the one

who is seen

the one who speaks

and the hearer of the word

all creatures bound

by a kinship persisting

until appeared

the middle managers

and thus began

history

the vision thickened

the speech grew slurred

and awkward

and everything stopped

Playa paraiso: photo by Michela Chemello, 2009

Promise: photo by Maxivida, 2006

TC: The New World and Trans/Versions: Two Views

2010-04-23T01:36:00.000-07:00

Tom Clark: The New World and Trans/Versions: Libellum, 2009

I...Michael Lally

Poet and translator Vincent Katz's Libellum press is proof that fine book making is not only not dead but alive and dancing.

The two latest publications from Libellum solidify the burgeoning reputation of the press as not only successful at creating fine books but at making available fine poetry.

Poet Tom Clark has been the main contributor to the Vanitas blog and is the sole contributor to his own poetry blog—TOM CLARK/BEYOND THE PALE—which to my mind is the best strictly poetry blog (where you go to read poetry, not opinions about it) on the web.

Now they've come together in the form of two books—THE NEW WORLD and TRANS/VERSIONS.

The latter is what some folks call a "chapbook"—meaning it's a very slim volume with a "saddle stitched" binding (meaning the pages are held together by two staples in the center of the middle two-page spread over which the pages are folded) and contains seven poems based on or translated from poems from other languages, including from the French (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme and Reverdy), Spanish (two poems by Vallejo) and German (Brecht).

They are delightfully insightful into the original intent, I believe, of the poets and of Clark's capacity for a kind of wisdom that few poets ever attain but most seem to always be writing as if they have. But Clark rarely if ever comes across as the sage, more like the older version of the guy who first made his mark as a humorous but brash young poet of the late 1960s and early '70s whose work fairly jumped off the page with the vitality of those times.

(Here's the last three lines from "Vallejo: The Vedic Fiber"—"What hasn't yet come along won't, but/what's already come and gone,/but what's already come and gone.")

I first learned of Clark as the poetry editor of The Paris Review who replaced the outdated stolid seriousness of poems based on what seemed by then ancient rhythms and/or self-serious ponderance with lighthearted, witty, and often close to incomprehensible experiments with language and subject matter that matched the musical soundtrack of those years.

He introduced us all to poets and styles that were what a lot of us had been trying to do ourselves or had at least been looking for and hoping others would discover and share, and there they all were, or a lot of them, in the poetry published in The Paris Review in those years.

Now, through his poetry blog BEYOND THE PALE he has become the sage our age needs (I mean "our age" as both these times and his and my actual years alive) and these two books demonstrate that for me. They still have a kind of ease with language that makes a lot of his lines seem conversational and simple, sometimes to the point of seeming obviousness, but then, there'll be that little or not so little turning on-a-dime that transforms what seemed simple and perhaps a given into something so much more subtle and graceful in ways only poetry seems capable of.

The poems in THE NEW WORLD capture that well, especially the ones that are more narrative, little stories about the people he encounters on his rounds in what I take as Berkeley, encounters that reveal the humanity in us all as well as the contradictions and challenges of accepting that. These poems in particular work as mini-movies for me, developing characters through close observation of their interactions and a story line that adheres to reality but nonetheless has an arc of narrative drive that satisfies.

They're too long to quote any in full (only a page or so but still) so here's a complete section (#4 titled "Flash Player 2008") from a different kind of narrative poem, the serial poem "A Retrospect" that opens the book (right after the earlier black-and-white family photo above that compliments the color one on the cover):

Strange to turn to old ghosts, watch ourselves dissolve
In their eyes. They were not here to help us,
Merely to drag us back against our will
Into a dim becalmed past, then forward into
Occluded presents which yet feel too bright.

These two books are the kind of treasures many book and poetry lovers I know delight in, because they are satisfying simply as objects, let alone for the original and often profound gems that can be found inside them.

(excerpted from a review in Lally's Alley, 4/20/10)

_________________________________________________________________________________

II...John Latta

Tom Clark’s The New World (Libellum, 2009) is one of a recent blessèd onslaught of Clark books: there is, too, Trans/Versions (Libellum, 2009)—works “after” Baudelaire, Reverdy, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Brecht, and Vallejo.

Took, d’abord, by the Trans/Versions, that insuperable splendid need to work (re-work) the textual “other,” to inhabit another, to fiddle—re-adjusting, gunning it a little—with the gears of the machine he (or she) assembled. Here’s Clark’s Rimbaud:

Tear (after Rimbaud)

Far from bird noise and lazy cattle and chatty girls
I knelt in a drowsy glade to drink
As the purple mist of the afternoon closed
In on the green growing things around the lake.

Was there something in the water there
Under those phantasmal mist-cloaked trees,
A golden liquor, barley colored, jewelled,
Under shrouded skies, that caused me to break out

In a strange feverish sweat? You could
Have made a Motel sign out of me I was so lit up,
With half the neon on the fritz
Spelling out VA*AN*Y into encroaching evening.

Then storm changed the sky: dark nations,
Poles, columns, shelves and terminals of cloud
Blown in a vast wave across the blue night.
The stream escaped away through the woods

To white sands. A sharp wind came up.
Sheets of isinglass spilled across the lake. To think
That intent as a searcher after Eldorado or a pearl
I persisted still in stooping to imbibe!

Two mimick-moments: “closed / In on the green growing things” and “break out / In a strange feverish sweat?” That WilliamCarlosWilliamsian (thank you, Frank) “VA*AN*Y” spritzing its fritz’d solenoids like soda! The perfect foreboding of “dark nations” of cloud is akin somehow to the tawdry manufactory’d “Sheets of isinglass” (the “new world” inimical to even common natural phenomena). Here’s Rimbaud’s 1872 original (though apparently a somewhat lopped off version accompany’d the Alchimie du verbe prose of Une Saison en Enfer):

Larme

Loin des oiseaux, des troupeaux, des villageoises,
Je buvais, accroupi dans quelque bruyère
Entourée de tendres bois de noisetiers,
Par un brouillard d’après-midi tiède et vert.

Que pouvais-je boire dans cette jeune Oise,
Ormeaux sans voix, gazon sans fleurs, ciel couvert.
Que tirais-je à la gourde de colocase?
Quelque liqueur d’or, fade et qui fait suer.

Tel, j’eusse été mauvaise enseigne d’auberge.
Puis l’orage changea le ciel, jusqu’au soir.
Ce furent des pays noirs, des lacs, des perches,
Des colonnades sous la nuit bleue, des gares.

L’eau des bois se perdait sur des sables vierges.
Le vent, du ciel, jetait des glaçons aux mares . . .
Or! tel qu’un pêcheur d’or ou de coquillages,
Dire que je n’ai pas eu souci de boire!

In Wyatt Mason’s fleet translation:

Tear

Far from birds, herds, and village girls,
I drank, crouched on a heath, surrounded
By hazelnut trees and
Warm green afternoon mist.

What was in this infant Oise I drank?
Voiceless elms, flowerless grass, cloudy sky?
What was in this colocasian gourd?
Its dull golden liquor makes me sweat.

As it was, I would have made a miserable tavern sign.
Storms kept changing the sky until nightfall.
These were dark lands, lakes, and poles,
Colonnades beneath the blue night, harbors.

Water from woods disappeared in virgin sands.
Wind from the heavens tossed ice onto ponds . . .
As if that would stop me from wanting a drink,
Like a panner for gold or diver for shells!

In larme, literally “tear,” a sense, too, of the faux-modest drinker’s “drop” or “splash,” un tout petit peu (not meaning it). Clark’s Rimbaud is one of particulars (see, “chatty girls” fleshing out villageoises, or the lovely “golden liquor, barley colored, jewelled” for the straightforward liqueur d’or, fade.) And, supremely, see how mauvaise enseigne d’auberge expands to fill Clark’s whole third stanza, becoming a miniature of Clark’s sense of things, self and the “dark nation” both: “lit up,” and “on the fritz,” with the end of something “encroaching.” (One thinks of the plaice, the flatfish that turns colors dying.) That “VA*AN*Y” “reads,” beyond the hosteller’s usual “VACANCY,” as an unletter’d Johnsonian “VANITY,” what flourishes amidst our human, too human wishes.

In The New World: aging (“time now opens up its eyes, / Yawns, stretches, struggles in dark to discover / Where it is among whirling things, places, years”); “the fading vestiges of the American dream”; the “Persistence of Memory” (“The not remembering / Is not so bad, it’s the resurgence of not / Forgetting that ruins everything”); childhood’s way of returning unbid (or through music—“Is That All There Is? Peggy Lee sounded / Justifiably disappointed. Fever / Kindled in me such heat that, after hearing / It in the back of a convertible en / Route to a softball game in La Grange, or some / Such western outpost, my suppressed and / Unacknowledged passion for unsuspecting / Fourteen-year-old Jan D. so distracted / Me that, playing first base, I lost a popup / in the lights . . .”); loss of friends and cohort (Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan). The terrific final piece:

Here

To one about to leave it, how beautiful and large
And familiar—as the old saying goes
Almost like home. And yet, the almost sticks
In one’s throat, just as one was leaving,
Why was it never better or more? What was
The real thing one expected? Always somewhere
Else and never here? And where do those
Winding roads go, and what’s around the next bend
And can this really be the end?

Never thought to skywalk, had doubts
That got in the way of transcending self
With its dumb momentary occupations,
Timidly and confusedly entered caves
To find the firelight on the wall dimly signifying,
Felt awkward with the ins and outs of thought,
Cheered inwardly oft for little reason,
Was shy of others, never to draw near
Yet longed for some company to be found
Down the line, can’t recall now where, in the end
Hoped only one day to find feet planted firmly
On this ground, wanted only to be here.

Affirmatory against an omnipotency of odds. (I note a lovely rhyme between “the almost sticks / In one’s throat,” and yesterday’s line in William Fuller’s “Reply to Experience”: “in that small excess of ‘almost’ clouds appear.”) I love the acknowledgment in “our” era of rampant selfishness (and its self-serving multiples) of the commonest self, the one of “dumb momentary occupations.” Sense of a sloughing off of all “display”: how refreshing.

(excerpted from a review in Isola da Rifiuti, 4/21/10)

Lightning over Eyjafjallajokull, Sunday 18 April: photo by Olivier Vandeginste, 2010
Tom, Juliet and Angelica Clark: photo by Gerard Malanga, 1970

Angelica and Tom Clark: photo by Juliet Clark, 2009
Tom Clark: photo by Mark Gould, 2005
Roll cloud, Las Olas Beach, Punta del Este, Uruguay: photo by Daniela Mirner Eberl, 2009

TC: Fireside Chat

2010-03-19T03:12:00.000-07:00

You really think free advice is worth money?
An old ghost rising up clammier than ever,
You can hear his teeth rattling. Let’s call
Him Fear Itself, and nestle up closer
To the warm and fatherly radio
Whence issue deep and reassuring words.
At the other end of the transmission
A world of static and black-edged clouds away
You can hear the fire crackling in the hearth
And if you strain your ears you might make out
A distant barking, perhaps the voice of Falla,
Woolly anachronism from a lost epoch.
Dogs speak in unintelligible words. Arf!
I take that back: unintelligible
To us. And we’re not reassured. Crisis
Of confidence time, then: credit default
Occurs when you can’t buy what they’re saying.
But wait, did you ever? Bought situation
City all these years and now someone’s
Surprised? Do crocodiles cry rivers
In order to have someplace to swim? Time for
Regulation arrives at one minute
Before the sun yo-yos up into the sky
And that tinny barking starts up again. Woof!
High time to begin drawing limits to thought.
This may be a fight for life. We may find
Both sides of the limit unthinkable. We may
Have to be able to think what can’t be thought,
Credit crunch or no. Credo means I believe
In crop circles. Or did I mean church
May be the last sanctuary of deceived
Believers in the free market dream?
You’ll find a crescent-shaped scar on my wrist
To prove to you this was no mere nightmare.
I’m in a weakened condition so go easy.
What can I do but hand over the payroll?

Fireside Chat: TC, from The New World (Libellum)

Crowd at New York's Union Bank during a bank run early in the Great Depression: photographer unknown, 1931 (U.S. Social Security Administration)

Banking crisis protest, Reykjavik: photo by Jon Eckman, 2008

TC: An American Abroad: England in the Mid-Sixties

2010-03-06T18:12:00.000-08:00

Tom Clark interviewed by Jeffrey Side, September 2009

JS: When did you first become interested in poetry?

TC: It must have been about 1957 or 1958. The first poems I remember liking a lot--as opposed to merely enduring as school assignments--were by (and I must admit this memory is pretty vague) e.e. cummings and Federico Garcia Lorca (Verde, te quiero verde...).

JS: When did you first start writing poems?

TC: I began then tinkering with some of my own self-serious small verse emissions, strictly in private mind you, in my environment such an activity would have been indefensible, and I've never much enjoyed playing defense.

Then at university it all opened up. The compulsory late Fifties Lowell period was followed shortly by several other more lasting interests, Stevens, Williams... and then there came the shock of encountering Ezra Pound, like walking out one morning and stumbling into in a deep canyon where a broad river gave issue to streams and rillets that led off and back and around and fanned out alluvially to flow toward everything in creation... and one's previous narrow path had been forgotten. Then read world literature as well as all world poetries intensely, acquiring at least at neophyte level such languages as were necessary for the journeying. Did an honors thesis on The Cantos that was published in the East/West Review, Kyoto.

By 1962-63 was writing quite a lot of poetry, won a university prize, had begun to publish. Went over to Cambridge in '63 and during my first year there found myself publishing poems in Poetry (Chicago), New Statesman, Spectator, Listener, TLS, Encounter, etc. That year also, Fall of '63, I took up poetry editorship of The Paris Review.

JS: You were poetry editor for The Paris Review at a young age (22). Did being so young affect your editorial decisions to any marked degree?

TC: No, I don't think so. The boldness or foolishness or whatever it was that caused me to summarily jettison the entire backlog of poems accepted by my editorial predecessor--several issues' worth in fact--probably resulted less from youth than from some permanent quality or defect of character.

At any rate I solicited and published in that venue poems from poets I'd been reading, Olson, Dorn, Creeley, Ashbery, O'Hara, Schuyler, Ginsberg, Duncan, Whalen, Blaser, Wieners, Eigner, Zukofsky, Niedecker, Oppen, Bunting, others; as well as from a number of younger American poets of my own generation and even the next, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Joanne Kyger, Aram Saroyan; and eventually also, once I'd gone back to the US, Clark Coolidge, Joe Ceravolo, Alice Notley, Jim Carroll, et al.

JS: You studied at Cambridge University in Britain during the 1960s. What was your impression of British poetry as compared to American poetry at that time?

TC: While at Cambridge I met others who were interested in some of those earlier poetries I've just mentioned: Andrew Crozier (who was at Christ's), Jeremy Prynne, John Temple (both of them resident at the college where I was a grad student, Gonville and Caius, the former as a tutor, the latter an undergrad and happily for me my good friend and house mate). The poet Tom Lowenstein was at Kings then, and we became friends; we've stayed in touch all these years. I also met Robert Creeley, whom I'd published and corresponded with (he was at New Mexico then), when he came over to do some readings, including one at the Kings Cross pub in Cambridge, not far from my then digs on the Newmarket Road, across from the Star Brewery and Midsummer Commons. RC and I would remain friends for over forty years.

JS: After Cambridge you studied at Essex University (also in Britain) where you knew Andrew Crozier with whom you edited the magazine The Wivenhoe Park Review. What motivated you both to start a magazine?

TC: In '65-'67 I was at Essex, teaching a bit, working on a protracted and never to be completed Pound dissertation, and there continued to do the PR editing and also started a mimeograph magazine series, Once, that ran to ten issues plus four chapbooks. I featured many of the poets named above (encouraged them to send me all their work, used what I could in PR, the rest in the mimeo). Also published in that series some young English poets I'd gotten to know, like Tom Raworth, Lee Harwood, Tom Pickard.

And yes, while there I also founded and edited The Wivenhoe Park Review with Andrew Crozier, who like me had come over from Cambridge to Essex. As to motivation... It was operated under a sort of official departmental subsidy in that we were afforded the equipment and services of the university print shop. (Whereas my own truly underground mimeo magazine was cranked out in the middle of the night in a broom closet, strictly sub rosa, and then snuck into the outgoing university mail under the disapproving noses of the night porters.) Donald Davie, who'd been my Ph.D. supervisor at Caius, had come over to start the new Department of Literature at Essex; in my second year there he brought in Ed Dorn (from Idaho), so there was that particularly interesting poet, soon a good friend, as company. The Dorns were living on the old Roman Road in Colchester; while at Essex I lived off at the coast in a cottage in Brightlingsea owned by John Barrell (whom I'd known at Cambridge when he'd been an undergrad at Trinity) and his wife Audrey.

Perhaps this comes back to your earlier question, "What was your impression of British poetry as compared to American poetry at that time?"

Well, it was my immediate poetic environment. I would go down to London at the weekend and see poets there, like Tom Raworth in Barnet and Lee Harwood in the East End. Other welcoming ports of call in London were the abodes of the poet Anselm Hollo and the publisher Barry Hall. All of the above became good friends. I also got around the landscape quite a bit to wherever there were readings, it was very much an impromptu read-if-you-show-up scene, so I hitchhiked all round and did readings from Newcastle (with Andrew Crozier, in Tom Pickard's Morden Tower, where too I was able to meet other interesting poets in Tom's orbit, both younger, as Barry McSweeney, and older, as Basil Bunting) to Nottingham (I remember Jonathan Williams, Brian Patten and Adrian Henry showing up at a jamboree reading there) to Oxford (where I read several times, to microscopic audiences of course), all the way down to Bristol (where in the thickets of Somerset I heard but did not see my first nightingale). There were a number of poets I'd routinely bump into on these volunteer junkets. Gael Turnbull, Michael Shayer, Roy Fisher, Jeff Nuttall, Bob Cobbing, Dom Sylvester Houédard, John Furnival were about, Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown were regulars, and Spike Hawkins whose work I especially liked, and also two Canadians, Lionel Kearns and Gerry Gilbert. The American poet Harry Fainlight then living in London was a familiar from that same time. Of course there were many readings in London as well. The biggest was a grand show at the Albert Hall in spring of '65. Readers as I recall were Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Robert Graves, Adrian Mitchell, Christopher Logue, Simon Vinkenoog, Ernst Jandl and a few lesser lights such as myself. I wore an overlarge black leather coat I'd bought for five quid on the King's Road two weeks before and read my poem "Superballs". Someone deep in the dark reaches of an upper balcony (how many holes would it take to fill the Albert Hall), once I'd announced the title of the poem, hollered, in a Cockney accent, "Wot?" I repeated the title. "Wot? again. A third time I tried. Once more the echoic bellow, "Wot?"

JS: During your stay in Britain, you hitchhiked across the country with Allen Ginsberg while he was visiting there in 1965. You also interviewed him for The Paris Review. What were your impressions of him during this time?

TC: We met at an art gallery in Bristol where we were both taking part in one of those informal, round-robin readings. We'd been in touch by mail, I had solicited poetry, we had had a pleasant correspondence. After the reading there was a crazy motorcycle sidecar ride through the wilds of Somerset and a long crowded night with what seemed like a hundred but was probably closer to ten poets trying to sleep on John James's extremely overcrowded floor. (Beyond which there peacefully slumbered sheep.) Allen, just back from an evidently somewhat exhausting stay in Prague, where he'd been elected King of the May, had a persistent hacking cough, so that the brief periods of sleep for everybody were synchronized with his gulps of some codeine cough medicine he had brought back from Prague along with whatever bacteria.

Allen was the first "international poet" I'd known. He had an acute sense of his international audience and thus, doing an interview in The Paris Review appealed to him immensely. We then hitchhiked together to Wells Cathedral and Glastonbury, where he plucked a flower from King Arthur's grave. There followed intense rainstorms and various further those-were-the-days adventures. Eventually by way of Bath and Reading (this begins to sound like a tale from Fielding or Defoe) we reached London. By then there was perforce a nice empathy. We went on up to Cambridge. Allen camped at my digs, while we taped the interview, on an old, borrowed and beat-up reel-to-reel machine, in several sessions. We went on several expeditions to the Fitzwilliam, where Allen wanted to clamp his glims on the Blake manuscript exhibitions. And he wanted to be taken to meet Morgan Forster at King's, which was nearly a disaster. The great novelist was not at home or at any rate not answering the door to unexpected visitors. I'd been to see him before, but that had been at Forster's invitation, in company with his former student George Plimpton. Allen left his calling card, a handwritten note covered with fields of daisies and skulls and crossbones. Have a nice day!

Interior East Side of Gonville Court, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge: photo by Jdforrester, 2003

Senate House passage in the snow (with Gonville and Caius Gate of Honour to left): photo by Monsarc, 2009

TC: Joseph Ceravolo: Ho Ho Ho Caribou

2010-02-26T06:07:00.000-08:00

for Rosemary

Leaped at the caribou.

My son looked at the caribou.

The kangaroo leaped on the

fruit tree. I am a white

man and my children

are hungry

which is like paradise.

The doll is sleeping.

It lay down to creep into

the plate.

It was clean and flying.

Where you...the axes

are. Why is this home so

hard. So much

like the sent over the

courses below the home

having a porch.

Felt it on my gate in the place

where the caribous jumped

over. Where geese sons

and pouches of daughters look at

me and say "I'm hungry

daddy."

III

Not alone in the

gastrous desert. We are looking

at the caribous out in the water

swimming around. We

want to go in the ocean

along the dunes.

Where do we like?

Like little lice in the sand

we look into a fruit expanse.

Oh the sky is so cold.

We run into the water.

Lice in heaven.

My heel. Ten o'clock the class.

Underwater fish

brush by us. Oh leg

not reaching!

The show is stopping

at the sky to drive in the

truck. Tell us where to

stop and eat. And

drink which comes to us out

in the sand is

at a star.

My pants are damp.

Is tonight treating us

but not reaching through the window.

Where is that bug going?

Why are your hips

rounded as the sand?

What is jewelry?

Baby sleeps. Sleeping on

the cliff is dangerous.

The television of all voice is

way far behind.

Do we flow nothing?

Where did you follow that bug

to?

See quick......is flying

Caribou, what have I

done? see how her

heart moves like a little

bug......under my thumb.

Throw me deeply.

I am the floes.

Ho ho ho caribou,

light brown and wetness

caribou. I stink and

I know it.

"Screw you!...you're right."

VII

Everyone has seen us out

with the caribou but

no one has seen us out in

the car. You passed

beyond us.

We saw your knees

but the other night we

couldn't call you.

You were more far than a

widow feeling you.

Nothing has been terrible.

We are the people who have

been running with

animals.

More than when we run?

VIII

Tell us where o eat to stop and eat

The diner is never gonna come.

The forest things are passing.

I did drink my milk

like a mother of wolves.

Wolves on the desert

of ice cold love, of

fireproof breasts and the breast

I took like snow.

Following me

I love you

and I fall beyond

and I eat you like a

bow and arrow withering in the

desert.

No one should be mean.

Making affection and all the green

winters wide awake.

Blubber is desert. Out on

the firm lake, o firm

and aboriginal kiss.

To dance, to hunt, to sing,

no one should be mean.

Not needing these things.

Like a flower, little light, you open

and we make believe

we die. We die all around

you like a snake in a

well and we come up out

of the warm well and

are born again out of dry

mammas, nourishing mammas, always

holding you as I

love you and am

revived inside you, but

die in you and am

never born again in

the same place; never

stop!

Ho Ho Ho Caribou: Joseph Ceravolo, from The Paris Review #44, 1968

Strolling reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) in the Kebnekaise valley, Lapland, Sweden: photo by Alexandre Buisse, 2007
Waterfall, Norde Isortoq, West Greenland: photo by Rene Moerkhoej, 2007
Peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus), Asturias, Spain: photo by Francisco M. Marzoa Alonso, 2005
Rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss): photo by Ken Hammond/USDA (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture)
Herd of caribou (Rangifer tarandus), Arctic national Wildlife Refuge: photo by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, 2008
Lemming (Lemmus lemmus), Norway: photo by Frode Inge Helland, 1987
Caribou (Rangifer tarandus), Suomi, near Ihari, Finland: photo by Lukas Riebling, 2005
Arctic fox (Alopex lagopus): photo by Marcel Burkhard, 2005
Cowberries (Vaccinium vitis-idaea): photo by Jonas Bergsten, 2006
Albino caribou (Rangifer tarandus) leading a train, Jämtland, Sweden: photo by oskarlin, 2005
Common cottongrass (Eriophorum scheuchzeri): photo by Franz Xaver, 1991

TC: Final Farewell

2010-02-15T07:11:00.000-08:00

Great moment in Blade Runner where Roy
Batty is expiring, and talks
about how everything
he’s seen will die with him --
ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,
sea-beams glittering before
the Tannhauser Gates.

Memory is like molten gold
burning its way through the skin.
It stops there. There is no transfer.
Nothing I have seen
will be remembered
beyond me.

That merciful cleaning
of the windows of creation
will be an excellent thing
my interests notwithstanding.

But then again I’ve never been
near Orion, or the Tannhauser Gates,
I’ve only been here.

Hong Kong Skyline: panoramic view: photo by Diliff, 2007
Ginza neon night rain: photo by Move Lachine, 2008

TC: Jim Dine: Old Me, Now

2010-02-02T05:28:00.000-08:00

I was seventy-four in June...

Age talks about how long a person has existed. These self-portrait drawings are about how many times, I’ve regarded my face minutely and have corrected and erased to get the feeling I want to show most accurately. I now am able, after all this looking, to enlarge my head to become a field of form and chatter and for it to be compared to a vast forest or a limestone quarry, for instance.

Finally, lying is not an option nor is decoration. I am committed to setting the record straight. Don’t worry, I will.

-- from Jim Dine: Old Me, Now: Self-Portrait Drawings, 2008-2009

I am an old man. I avoid mirrors.

Pretty is pretty. But the truth is the truth. Often not pretty.

Instead of looking away from the unprettiness, Jim Dine has made the weight and pull of time into an instrument of vision.

The unrelenting honesty of self-perception is absolutely heroic. Take a hard look at On Ardmore Ave (2009). It will stare right through you.

Hard looking is the mode as well as the subject of this work.

The titles of the drawings tell the story.

Eyes Gone Over, Thin Red Lips, Old Rider, The Stain of Time, Staring in the Evening, Dark Song, Singing Hard Times, Faded Eyes in My Head.

There is a short film I once saw that presents Rembrandt's self-portraits in a swift slideshow, showing the features changing subtly with age as the artist, watching himself with unwavering truthfulness, grows old. Flesh and bone coalescing in an accelerated version of unforgiving meltdown, the unkind work of time upon the human face. It's very moving to see. And Old Me, Now made me think of it.

"Finally, lying is not an option, nor is decoration..."

This may well be no country for old men. Small wonder then that Jim Dine's book comes from a publisher in "The Old World". It speaks to us from Beyond the Limits of Positive Thinking.

Nothing is personal then
And everything is true
Including love's great circumambience
And the skull in the mirror

The mortal intimation
Of souls of beings long since lost
In a forgotten past
And the deep pink nescience

Of the thought evacuated tissue
Glaring back at you
Through the empty eyeholes
In the mask

The New Man: Jim Dine, 2009, from Old Me, Now: Steidl & Partners/Richard Gray Gallery, 2010 (photo by Arthur Aubry via Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago)
Paris After Aldo Died, 2009, from Old Me, Now: Steidl & Partners/Richard Gray Gallery, 2010 (photo by Arthur Aubry via Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago)

TC: Pam Brown: In the Blue Mountains

2010-01-31T06:56:00.000-08:00

hoping for a place

deep in the shade

verandahs all around,

to contemplate

what brought us here

excerpt from "Worldly goods": True Thoughts, Pam Brown, Salt Publishing, 2008
Forest in the Blue Mountains: photos by Adam J.W.C., 2008

TC: Click

2010-01-12T01:40:00.000-08:00

One may age ten years in ten minutes.
It's too quiet. I can hear the crickets,
It's like a music of the spheres in reverse,
A whack recursiveness of thinking,
Or is it just the night-clicking computer god
And what kind of iterative god is that?

Pascal had his pit, which went with him
Where'er he went, like a faithful dog,
Nor was he out of it. Infinity I can see
From here. It looks empty, unrelenting,
Cold. There is no respite from Being
And Number, a poet once told us that

When it was getting late for him
And night panic passed through his hair
Making it stand on end, the little he still
Had of it. I'll go to the wall, stand with it,
Let it be my friend, just to have something
That won't fall down. I feel giddy, said the clown.

I believe in a world. Is God or death more great?
This world is my world and will vanish with me
But while I click it goes on existing
In eternity -- to 2046 or
2666, or whene'er the chips melt down.
I've lost Memory writing this.

I've aged ridiculously in ten minutes,
Maybe ten years. Distance is closing in,
It's too quiet. I can hear the crickets
Singing God and death out of existence.
More power to them. Click.
The intricate circuits of a summer night.

Click: from The New World, Libellum Books, 2009
Under the Elms: Fairfield Porter, 1971-72 (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts)

TC: Brecht: Die Opiumräucherin

2010-01-12T01:37:00.000-08:00

You know a girl who loses herself nightly in the black smoke

Before long finds herself a zombie's nihil bride.
She can't be lowered later nor can she be uplifted.
Two out of three mornings she won't even seem alive.

Why try keeping her chin up, there's no longer the incentive.
Her nerve is gone, her hair and looks are shot.
Passing a shopwindow, she sees a stranger reflected.
Who's that person? Must be someone she's not.

The smoke inveigles itself into her blood, fogs her head.
She sleeps alone now to be closer to the soil
That's reeling her in on an invisible thread.

That she exists at all escapes her notice.
In the end she'd prefer invisibility, reserving
All her attentions for a girl's best friend.

Die Opiumräucherin: Bertolt Brecht, c. 1926; English version: TC, from Trans/Versions, Libellum Books, 2009
Shelf cloud over Moscow: photo by Chesnok, 2006
Rolling thunderstorm shelf cloud (Cumulonimbus arcus), Enschede, the Netherlands: photo by John Kerstholt, 2004

TC: A Une Jeune Fille

2010-01-07T05:48:00.000-08:00

You might fill empty futures with your raging

Power. Everything is possible.

The story has not yet begun yet promises

Much. Having glimpsed the magic ring

On the captive's finger, the bright-eyed heroine

Might turn out to be you, making your way

Up mountains of difficulty to shining

Temples in which is kept alive that flame

Of truth which burns at the heart of the ark

Of the covenant of being you.

You might, in the forest, hear that falling tree.

You're young, you want to be free, but aren't yet.

You might walk the cow, ride the rocket ship.

You might book the flight, then jump out of the plane.

You might meet a boy named X. He might say

You don't know me, nor do I know you.

Portrait of a Young Venetian Woman: Albrecht Dürer, 1505 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

Heinrike Dannecker: Christian Gottlieb Shick, 1802 (Nationalgalerie, Berlin)