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.

[next]

Christmas graveyard

Reno in December

Plonk and his girlfriend are cozied up by the pool this morning, she lounging in the tub and he nested in the grass next to her, cleaning his gray feathers and airing his under wings, making him look like a pigeon angel. Sorry, Internet. No Bird Park videos until the writer's strike is settled.

Casinos from Dreamer's Cafe

However, it being The Season, I will post this video I did yesterday. Christmas graveyard. If these trees could talk, what stories would they tell? Listen closely and you can catch moments of a woman and some old man crooning along with Bing. Reno Goodwill. Cheery as hell. Be prepared. It is the digital equivalent of a stale but very rummy rum soaked bit of fruit cake, the kind you might find at the bottom of an ornament box long after the fact.


Christmas graveyard

01:01

Found art

This from BlueGal, a page from her then 9 year old son's day planner, a perfect found art poem/meditation on the nature of time. Plus it's hilarious. And be sure to check out the quote from Unknown in the upper right hand corner.

Beautiful MInd

Stephen Wiltshire did not speak his first words "pencil" and "paper" until he was 5. Yet, at 11 he drew a perfect aerial view of London after only one helicopter ride. Even the number of windows of all the major buildings was correct. ColourField Productions tested the "Living camera" in Rome. They flew him over the city, then asked him to draw a 5 1/2 yard panoramic picture of the city from memory in 3 days.


Beautiful Mind

05:22

Yesterday's news

I had lunch at India Kabab yesterday. Warning: If you click on their link, adjust your speakers first. You'll be met with a blast of jaunty Indian movie music. India Kabab is my current favorite buffet in Reno. The food is good. I love dahl anyway plus I have an abiding fondness for tiny, downtown cafes. One of the other things to recommend India Kabab is the televisions tuned to a delightfully bad Bollywood MTV channel. The videos are so sentimental and impossibly romantic that they are the equivalent of Mexico's De Película Clásico, the 24 hour twilight zone of 30's - 50's era soaps. For me these things create a kind of global village hometown feel, but then I'm weird. But M. Lee is worse. On our last trip to Mexico, he so got deeply addicted to De Película that I seriously began to worry about him.

Flash back
Wednesday, November 23, 1870

I was in town for a follow-up appointment with the hand surgeon. (hand healing nicely, btw) He shares an office complex which houses an incredible collection of old Nevada photos rivaling any well endowed museum. I photographed this article while waiting in the exam room. It's from the front page of the 1870 Nevada State Journal. As it was framed, behind glass, hanging on a wall and a little too high for me to easily reach, the quality is poor, but, if you like language, history, politics, and/or schadenfreude, it's worth the trouble to read it. This story about the shooting of lawyer A.P. Crittenden by Mrs. Fair, the old harlet, has it all. I can only imagine what the writer would have to say about our current batch of rotten celeb religious politicos!

NaNoWriMo tips

my apologies to Benedetta Bonichi for screwing with her beautiful artwork.

"Art is never finished, only abandoned." - Leonardo da Vinci

To which I add, "To abandon a work, one must first begin it."

NaNoWriMo is coming up and for those of you preparing to do it this year, here are the tips as promised.

Abandon all, ye who enter here.
Husband/wife/partner/children/friends/pets/work associates/probation officer. Let them all know in advance that they are on their own for the month of November, orphans all, no exceptions. One successful NaNo writer here in Reno, she completed 3 manuscripts in the last 3 years, prepares in October. She fills the freezer with frozen dinners, stuffs the pantry with snacks and easy to prepare boxed meals, soup to nuts, to keep the family alive while she lives the dream. They will survive. November is novel writing month. They can deal with it if you make it clear in advance that this is their only option. Don't worry. Besides, it is over all too soon.

Be a slob.
Another thing this woman does is buy a few sets of cheap sweat pants and tops in advance so that she doesn't have to think about what she's going to wear during NaNoWriMo. If you have to deal with a dress code at work, church, seeing your PO ... whatever ... figure it all out now. You don't want to waste time doing it November.

Word count is everything.
Tell the damn Internal Editor to take a hike. Don't edit. Write. No exceptions. Be a word slut. Keep the fingers moving no matter how nasty the writing may be. One thing I did to throw my IE off the scent was change the color of my font from black to white. Silly as that may sound, it helped.

Avoid distractions at all cost.
Admit your powerlessness over people, places and things. For example, I quickly learned that I could not write in my office because when I am here I always end up down the rabbit hole. Guaranteed. It starts simply enough. Got to go to dictionary.com to look up a word or hop on google for a flash to check a reference. Lies! All lies! Once I get online it's over so I pulled the plug. I took a crummy old laptop, left the wi-fi card at home, and ran to a public place almost every day. It cost me maybe 100 bucks in bistro coffee, food and gas but it was worth it. Consider it office rent. Cheap.

Word count is EVERYTHING.
Don't Do not use contractions. Avoid hyphenated words. Expand. Let the bullshit flow. You've got what it takes. I know you do!

Participate in the NaNo community.
Join a regional NaNo forum. Don't think that you are better than everyone else, that they are amateurs and you the real writer. You can do it for 30 days. Support is vital. Visit the NaNo site often. Listen to NaNo Radio. It helps you remember what you are doing. I also donated to the project, the minimum 10 bucks which put a golden halo over my name in the forums. Besides being a way to express my appreciation for all the work the organizers put into it, I felt more a part of things. Trust me. It helps.

Get some writing buddies.
Get competitive. It makes it more real. Go to a local write-in. Get down with other crazy writers in your area. Remember, they are also trying to write the first draft of their novel in 30 days.

Don't fall behind!
If you do, the wolves will get you.

my apologies to Toby Mitchel for screwing with his charming artwork.

Write damnit! WRITE!
1666.6666666666666666666666666667 words a day. Once ya get yer groove goin, ain't no thang. Stay up to catch up. This is your month to go crazy so go crazy! If you have prepared your circle properly, they won't try to talk you out of it when your hair starts arcing with electrostatic energy.

No, I won't be participating this year. I haven't done anything with the still steaming 50,000 word pile I did last year but I will be there in spirit and checking up on your progress. It's a blast. Love it. Treat yourself to the madness and the fun. It's worth the trouble.

Signals and shards

Tonopah, oh Tonopah!

We're leaving in the morning for Tonopah, one of my favorite Nevada (nearly) ghost towns. It's getting harder and harder to find things there I haven't already photographed but I'll try. On Sunday we are going on to revisit an area where, a couple of years ago, I found scattered remnants from what appears to have been the Fremont culture, namely their distinctive gray painted pottery shards accompanied by lots of arrowheads and a couple of chipping stations. Pieces of a mystery. According to the Utah History Encyclopedia,

"Fremont pottery first occurs as early as 1,500 years ago in several caves and rock shelters associated with mobile hunting and gathering groups and is not found in what we think of as settled villages until several hundred years later ... Whether or not Fremont peoples died out, were forced to move, or were integrated into Numic-speaking groups is unclear."

Otherwise, here's the photo I took of The City from where we stopped. We'd already passed it crossing the valley on our way back to camp.

The City, a work in progress by Michael Heizer, The New York Times called Heizer art's last, lonely cowboy. Don't miss the article's slide show. If you want to see The City in Google Earth, the coordinates are 38°01'48" N, 115°26'10" W

No, we didn't go back in hopes of cashing Heizer's exhibit. He won't allow the public to view his work until after his death. However, here are photos of some people who did try.

Area 51 buffs searching for Michael Heizer and the Complex City

The dark of the moon is on the 11th so we should have a wonderful view of the night sky this trip, elbow to elbow stars. We should be back by the end of next week.


Here's what James Gandolfini has been up to since the Sopranos.

Pigeon vs. crow

The photos at Everything is Permuted are consistently outstanding. The photographer chronicles the lives of a family of foxes that have visited his backyard for years, but he also turns his camera everywhere, capturing stunning moments like this fight between a pigeon and a crow. When you have a moment to relax, treat yourself.

NICO 60/40

This is clip of Nico singing somewhere in New York in the early '80's (thanks Jose) and is a painfully sad footnote to her heroin addiction.


NICO 60/40

Bass in the bathtub updade

The bass speaks

The bass is out of the bathtub. The other day we had a buyer. It was love a first sight. He bought it, half up front and years to pay, no interest, but when he got it home he freaked out. He plays for the Reno Philharmonic and it turned out that it wasn't as loud as his current bass, which was a deciding factor. Plus, I think he decided that he couldn't afford it. The poor guy recently moved to a double wide in the valley after his divorce. His wife got the house in Tahoe. As he put it, she got the gold, he got the shaft. Anyway, of course we refunded his dough but crap. But now that the fiddle is out of the tub, neither of us have the heart to put it there again. It just seems wrong. It has such a heartbreakingly beautiful sound. Now we have to find it a home. We were going to take it to LA as Bonhams and Butterfields will be there doing appraisals next month, but decided against it. We wouldn't do a consignment with them anyway. Brad (the musician) gave us a San Francisco contact who seems better suited to our needs. At this point, we are not sure what to ask for it, eight to ten thousand was always the upper end. You know how these things are. You get what you pay for but you also only get what people are willing to pay. Either way, it is a beautiful instrument, perhaps as much as two hundred years old, solid, hand-crafted wood and in great shape, but Lee's x-dirty beatnik bebop bass player dad, heavily modified the neck. It is ... at this point in it's star-crossed life, after 50 years in someone's basement, or was that good fortune? ... a jazz bass. Want to buy a great bass? We will make you a sweeeeeeet deal.

Strange days

I have been too swamped the last few days to spend any time on line, but I always have my camera with me so here are a few strange things I came upon in recent days.

I can't imagine how hanging strips of toilet paper from the supermarket ceiling is suppose to be attractive to people but obviously the manager at the local Raley's finds it so. To me it merely underscores the obvious connection between eating and shitting.

The Salvation Army had this neat item for sale. No. I didn't buy it. The Raley offered enough virtual reality for my "taste" this week, thank you.

As I do from time to time, I visited the grave of the unknown baby boy who died in the '60s. There is no name on his marker and he only lived a couple of days. I'm not the only one in town who looks in on him. The cartoon drawn on the scrap of wood is new since my last visit but I was alarmed to see tire tracks across the lower, right edge of his tiny resting place. The images came out very bleached and over exposed which seems to fit the melancholy shrouding his little grave.

Happy Birthday Cheeta

Today is Cheeta the Chimp's 75th birthday and Cheeta Day in Palm Springs, so named by former Mayor Ron Oden. Cheeta, aka "Jiggs," was one of the stars of the original Tarzan movies, in case you are an uncultured slob and don't know much about Hollywood celebrities. Cheeta celebrated with a sugar-free cake and diet soft drinks, proving that indeed wisdom does come with age.


After retiring from the movies, Cheeta fell on hard times with booze and cigars but that's all behind him now. He got sober, moved to Palm Springs, famous retirement community for old movie stars, and took up painting, which helps pay the bills.




There have been 4 unsuccessful attempts to secure a star for Cheeta on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. What's up with that? Cheeta is a better actor than half the smucks who's stars act as grinding stones for cigarette butts. Filmmaker Matt Devlen is organizing another campaign for 2007. Be ready to vote. The Guinness Book of World Records lists Cheeta as the world's oldest primate (note from Wikipedia: presumably meaning oldest non-human primate). Besides that he is just one cool dude. So Happy Birthday, Cheeta.

Then and now

I brought back one of my mother's old photo albums from Seattle. It is what she wanted by her side as she lay in her death bed the final days of her life. The memories made her happy. The cover is missing, many of its black pages are torn or loose and they are simultaneously brittle and alarmingly soft. The whole thing is gradually disappearing with the passing years. My brother asked me to scan what is left of them before they are beyond capture. They are lovely. They have haunted me ever since I saw them there at the hospital so, a few years ago, I wrote a poem for them and her and today I joined them together. I hope you enjoy them.

Seattle, omens and images

I don't need no stinkin flash, she said.
Dinner party

I'm back from Seattle and running to catch up with unfinished business here. I worked in the garden all day yesterday, didn't touch my computer and went to bed achy and scratchy. It felt good. I spent most of today helping someone out with a project and then back to the garden. I want everything I planted yesterday to grow immediately into a tall, green secret world into which I can disappear at will. Tomorrow I must prepare a submissions packet for the Nevada Arts Council Fellowship deadline this Friday. Third time running but I don't expect it to be a charm. So far, I printed out the entry form but that's it. I promised myself I'd open my NaNoWriMo manuscript from last November to see if there is anything in it I can harvest. That should be painful. Mostly, I consider this exercising the idea of "writing for money".

Aunt Peggy,

beauty and mind destroyed by alcoholism

For now, here are a few photos from last week. The one WATCH YOUR STEP turned out to be rather prophetic. I knew it at the time and almost didn't take it hoping to ward off its dire prediction but no point in that. Things are what they are. It was wonderful spending time with my family but the lines twisted with my daughter, as they often seem to do. I thought it was hard being a mother's daughter but the fact is I was very difficult. The justice is that it can be so much more painful being a daughter's mother. I made so many mistakes along the way that even now they cast a chill shadow but this evening I did manage to put a few peanuts out before the 7 o'clock magpie arrived. At least I got that right.

Union St. wall

Urban wildlife

Union St. steps

University of Washington

Chinatown window

Morning, Lake Washington

Farmers Market afternoon

Uwajimaya grocery section

Seattle Public Library "Red Hall"

Adieu

I'm going to Tonopah for the weekend. That's the half ghost town located a few miles west of the northwestern boundary of Area 51. It's the town that won't die because everybody has to stop there for gas and there's couple of prisons in the area that employ people. I have photographed the place a lot but will see if I can come back with an interesting new shot or two. Wish me luck. Oh and I left Uncle Orson cued up. If you need anything, ask him. (re-enactment)

Orson Wells outtake (re-enactment)

Poetry money

A few years ago Poetry Magazine inherited some two hundred million dollars from heiress Ruth Lilly (Lilly Pharmaceuticals). Ruth was an eccentric recluse, a bit like Howard Hughes, but instead of airplanes she doted on poetry. Over the years she even occasionally, anonymously, submitted some of her own work to the magazine but it was always rejected. Founded by Harriet Monroe at the beginning of the twentieth century, the journal has high standards:

Mission

"The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free from entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written. Nor will the magazine promise to limit its editorial comments to one set of opinions."

—Harriet Monroe, 1912

The Poetry Foundation was established in a bit of a scramble when the magazine received its unfettered fortune but they took the flying leap that only money can buy. According to its chairman John Barr, Poetry Foundation has become a proper "bully pulpit". Self-described "real moguls", the Foundation's CEOs decided to invest in themselves first, the trickle down formula favored by most captains of industry. The first thing they're doing is building themselves a glorious headquarters from which to operate.

Men who previously avoided being associated with poetry's riffraff image have decided to spiff it up, monetize it, supersize it, glamorize it, mass market it. I suppose that sooner or later it had to happen. Whether or not I agree with their approach, I agree things are in a sad state. I don't know about you, but personally I can't stand the gassy narcissism that currently passes for poetry.

The moguls have plunked it all down on red. It's a stiff bet. Harriet Moore brought T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Ezra Pound and others to light. The Foundation plans to better that and up the ante. They plan to launch a Renaissance. Naturally skeptics predict the Foundation will merely do the expected ... establish a royal court, anoint an inner circle and reign over it gloriously until the whole scene implodes under the weight of its own vanity. Who knows? I do like their new website. It has some interesting pages such as Dispatches: News. Refreshing. So many writer's circles and publishing houses have their wagons ringed up tight and the only stories they tell around the campfire are about themselves.

When the money arrived, Poetry Magazine's then editor relinquished his post to head up the newly formed Foundation but didn't long survive the surge of bullies like John Barr from Wall Street. Christian Wiman is its new editor. I met him not long after he took the job. He came to Nevada to be the keynote speaker for a writer's conference I peripherally helped put together. I liked him. He seemed very grounded, open and unimpressed with himself. He critiqued one of my poems. I'm not much into things like writer's conferences and don't run around courting people's opinions about my writing so, other than the fact that I am an incurable showoff, I didn't expect much. To my relief, he didn't offer "advice". He simply challenged the need for the final stanza. When I wrote it I knew I had flinched so I very much appreciated his astuteness. I hope he continues to stick to the code. And I hope the Foundation knows what it is. We all know money talks but can it, will it, walk? Guess we'll see. Anyway, they've made some nicely designed broadsides available at Dispatches: Gallery for the Fridge Archive. Go on. Download one. Spread the word. Poetry's baaaaaaaaack.







Christian Wiman Poetry Magazine Poetry Magazine writing Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly Harriet Monroe

Sunday dreamin'

My grandfather used to talk to himself, a lot. I could never make out what he was saying. All I heard was a steady stream of whispers mixed in with his breath. As a kid I worried that it might be a family trait. I do talk to myself sometimes but I'm still not as bad as Grandpa Chance.

For instance, when I'm writing I often speak the words out loud first. Take the sentence I just wrote, and the one I'm writing now. I said them both out loud as I composed them. I'm quiet now but actually, by the time I typed out the first 3 words of this sentence, they were no longer true. I thought the words "I'm quiet now" decided to write them without speaking them so they would be true in real time, but as I typed them I spontaneously said them out loud and muttered "typed it out" while I typed that. There's a peak into my head, in case you wanted one but were afraid to ask.

And, while I'm on the subject, I might as well admit that I did mutter to myself this morning, something to the effect of, "Humans are a violent, greedy, predator species; carnivores who fancy having a unique, divine nature and personal relationship with a god who likes them better than everybody else and doesn't mind if they torture and/or kill the rest of his family."

It is Sunday morning and I am off to a rocking start. Minutes after I got online I found myself watching a video of soldiers in the Islamic Army inspecting a helicopter they just downed and executing the sole survivor, probably a Blackwater contractor. Then I watched Anna Nicole's funeral procession in the Bahamas, and videos of several other totally unrelated events, although their disparate nature actually underscores just how prone we humans are to self-undoing. My ricochet tour brought me back to the question I pondered aloud in the shower earlier this morning. Can we, as a species, survive our own precocious narcissism long enough to wake the fuck up? Then I found the following gritty view of hope. Now I'm off for second cup of coffee while I've still got a chance of a day. Bon matin, mon ami!

END OF CONFLICT

Morning

It's morning again in my part of the world. It's a lovely morning although I did miss seeing the new nova in Scorpius at dawn. Here I am again, wondering which way to go. Lots running through my head. So many possibilities. Instead of choosing one, I am circling the event horizon of the day and, as always from the approach point of view, possibilities never appear to cross the horizon. It takes an effort to escape this hypnotic spell. I no longer take freedom for granted.

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.” - Jack Kerouac

Nora and Paris, music lovers

Nora, the musician

Paris, the fan

Night without candles

White Owl by asha

_________________________________________________

A STORY
by Czeslaw Milosz

Now I will tell Meader's story; I have a moral in view.
He was pestered by a grizzly so bold and malicious
That he used to snatch caribou meat from the eaves of the cabin.
Not only that. He ignored men and was unafraid of fire.
One night he started battering the door
And broke the window with his paw, so they curled up
With their shotguns beside them, and waited for the dawn.
He came back in the evening, and Meader shot him at close range,
Under the left shoulder blade. Then it was jump and run,
And a real storm of a run: a grizzly, Meader says,
Even when he's been hit in the heart, will keep running
Until he falls down. Later, Meader found him
By following the trail—and then he understood
What lay behind the bear's odd behavior:
Half of the beast's jaw was eaten away by an abscess, and caries.
Toothache, for years. An ache without comprehensible reason,
Which often drives us to senseless action
And gives us blind courage. We have nothing to lose,
We come out of the forest, and not always with the hope
That we will be cured by some dentist from heaven.

Berkeley, 1969

_________________________________________________





Czeslaw Milosz poetry