Speaking of dreams

Inventory update

To tell you the truth, my poetry inventory is not going so well. It has... well... for the moment... stalled out... and been replaced by the production of Baby T ts. Awhile ago, back before Baby Thea was born, her mama requested a silkscreened version of this blackbird on a onesie. Onesies are clothes sized 0 to 3 months, baby clothes in other words. While I am extremely flattered she liked the drawing enough to request it, I haven't gotten around to getting it silkscreened yet. I don't know how it will be received but I decided to draw directly on the garment instead. Silkscreening is costly but I can see doing it for a bag or a bib, something that will be in use for a while, but Baby Thea will outgrow a onesie in a minute.

Secondly, and here's where artistic considerations come in. Everyone has reproductions but how many people wear clothes that are themselves one-of-a-kind works of art? Seems to me Baby Thea deserves no less. (Kimberlee, your baby too, if you're interested) So, I decided to give it a whirl. I picked up six onsies at the second hand store. What's to lose? I did one drawing yesterday. It may be too strange but there's no going back once the pen touches the cloth. This is the bird that emerged from the ink. Too odd for a baby? Maybe. I've got five more onsies to go. Meanwhile, my fault alone, the writing inventory languishes, the folders stacked and set to the side. I will get back to it. Really.

"Remember: 75% goes in the shredder. At the advice of an actual editor, not the one living in my head, I'm going through the old manuscript with a firm and unsentimental hand. I have 100 pages to go. Whack whack. Does a body good. Don't flinch." JudyBlueSky's comment. She's right, of course, but she's working on a prose draft. If I whack whacked 75% of this file, there'd be about five pages. In my defense I must say, for every page that has made it this far, 75 were whack whacked before the ink dried. Poetry is a brutal craft.

After images 1

Jupiter's influence

Seattle walkabout, part 4

Fisherman's Terminal - Salmon Bay, Seattle

The docks at Fisherman Terminal   were home briefly in my twenties.
It wasn't a good time in my life

so during our recent trip to Seattle

I had to visit the place again,

put old ghosts to rest or perhaps

bring them home.

They are welcome with me.

"Glorified One" by Leo Kenney
Taken at Seattle Art Museum, July '08

Dreaming you too

Acolyte

Black Bird's hat

Worlds within worlds and poets under glass

Okay.



Santee Alley and Chinatown



two days rolled into one, with a passing glance at the tar pits.



We started at Santee Alley, which proved to be a great fun maze



like markets in Mexico





merged with a Hollywood





madhouse







a jumbled, swirling



temporary escape



from corporate



America





After the market we went to Chinatown, had lunch at Yang Chow's



and walked around



taking in the sights.



One morning, two worlds
then we went on to LACMA with hopes of also visiting the La Brea excavations going on next door.

Unfortunately, we just didn't have time to visit the tar pits. LACMA is just so huge. By the time we

were done, we were done but I did get a glimpse of the mammoth family at the pond. I've written about them here before. They haunt me. There they are, right on Wilshire Blvd, locked in a life or death drama. I know a guy here in Nevada who grew up in the La Brea area and remembers when giant fossilized skulls still protruded from the tarry sludge, mouths open, tusks thrust skyward, unchanged since the animals sank into the tar thousands of years ago. Now the bones, and so many more, have been excavated and this diorama stands in place as a memorial. The mother's feet are stuck in the gooey tar bottom of the pond and her mate and their baby, wild with fear and grief, watch helplessly from the shore as she tries to free herself. It's heartbreaking. The way the baby is stretching his trunk out to her, I can nearly hear his screams. It's as though the three of them have been struggling for the last 20,000 years to save her from an almost certain death.

We thought we might visit them and the excavation at Pit 91 after LACMA but as it turned out the museum was more than enough. M. Lee and I have been there before but still it was incredible and overwhelming. Along with everything else, the museum is currently showing Southern California Art of the 1960s and 70s and included were excepts from Semina, a "hand-printed, free-form, loose-leaf art and poetry journal privately published and distributed to a handful of friends and sympathizers" by Wallace Berman between 1955 to 1964, considered a "brilliant compendium of the most interesting artists and poets of its time."

The pages are displayed under a glass case. I looked for something from my uncle, not that I expected to find anything. Insanity and alcoholism scrambled him well before death finished the job. But I always check when there's anything about poets from the Beat era. I was just ready to move on and, to be honest, totally self-absorbed. Pointless. Why bother? Blah. Blah. Kathy found him. That's M. Lee's mom. She noticed that there was a poem by John Chance in the collection. She knew him in North Beach in the 50's, heard him read in the bars. Knew him from the scene. Mother of Beat Baby, don't ya know. She's a very cool lady. Bob Kaufman asked her to be godmother to one of his children, back in the day. In fact, it's her treat that we're in LA this week. She'd be in China now but her Chinese friend and traveling companion/interpreter had to opt out due to health reasons so the three of us came here instead. She found him ... Uncle John ... at the tar pit ... under glass.

The Security wouldn't let me photograph his poem. Museum rules. So I copied it and one more near by.

Talking Buddhism With My Lawyer


Every idea we took was carried to a point,
where it disappeared
into the infinity of possibility.

So there we sat.
There was something humorous
About charging out to the edge of the infinite

Only to find ourselves in that moment
Looking blankly across the table at one another
Locked in the same little room.

The ticker-tape clicking ignorant staccato
Outside the glass like a Zen Master.


~ John Chance


Excerpt from Pantopon Rose


Stay away from the Queen's Plaza, son ... Evil spot fuzz haunted by dicks scream for dope fiend lover ... too many lives ... heat flares out from the broom closet high on ammonia ... like burning lions ... fall on poor old lush workers scare her veins right down to the bone her skin pop a week or do that five-twenty-nine kick handed out free and gratis by NYC to jostling junkies ... So Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor, beware ...


~ William S. Burroughs

RIP Uncle John.

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Getty and the goats

The first time I stood before Van Gough's "Irises", I cried. As far as I am concerned, it is the jewel of the Getty. And I cried again yesterday. I don't know why. I don't cry easily. I tear up over animal videos on YouTube and am outraged when children are drawn into the gruesome atrocities we adults spool and strut but, beyond that, I am dried eyed. Fool's tale. But this painting makes me cry.




"Irises" is part of the Getty's permanent collection but currently the museum is temporarily hosting a very disturbing exhibit by photographer Graciela Iturbide and good for them. Otherwise, they are merely caretakers of a lovely, very expensive archive of safe antiquities.




One section, titled "The Goat's Dance", I found not just provocative but heartbreaking. It put me in such a very dark place. I am in Los Angeles with M. Lee and his mother and at this point, they had the good sense to go their own way. We decided to meet in an hour and a half and I sat in front of the photos and wrote for a while. Sometimes, it's the only thing left to do.








After the Getty, we stopped by New Dvaraka, the Krishna temple on Watseka Ave. I lived there years ago, and at the temple's original location on La Cienega Blvd. It is so strange going back. We were there for the 4:40 darsan with the dieties, (viewing). I bought a new pair of kartals (cymbals) then we went across town for falafel, which turned out to be too rich.






So tomorrow in our little excursion de culture , off to Santee Alley, Chinatown, the LACMA, Rodeo Drive, followed by a drive through in Beverly Hills.

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