the virgin of flames

the virgin was important to the people here. not only as a symbol of the adopted religion of Catholicism, but because she was a brown virgin who appeared to a brown saint, Juan Diego. She was also a symbol of justice, of a political spirituality. He had watched every year the procession to her, her effigy carried high through the streets of East L.A. starting from the corner of Cesar Chavez, held up, aloft, like a torch. That procession had been an annual event from the thirties, Iggy told him... The Virgin appeared here often, to reassure her people no doubt. In the Winchell's Donut Shop on Fourth and Soto, hovering in the window for the longest time, transforming the local treat into the most sought after cure for every ailment and malaise... Rumors of these apparitions spread by word of mouth and fast. The news was wrapped in Big Macs and passed over counters, it filled buckets of K.F.C., was whispered in the hush of washing machines in the Laundromat, passed out on the street between passersby and even between the dealers and their clients.

--The Virgin of Flames, by Chris Abani

californian christmas tree

the Copernican Myths

This is a rather long-winded excerpt but part of a fascinating article "The Copernican Myths" by Mano Singham that I've been thinking a lot about lately as well as another million things.

It's important to always question and think critically about what people tell you, and history, which was always presented in such a boring, dry way to me as a teenager. History has become much more interesting to me now as I grow older, and just as importantly, now that I've travelled to some nice parts of world where these events took place. The two-dimensional stories, dry texts and fairytales grow fleshed out and colorful and full of many more social, political and economic implications than i could ever imagine!



Let us start with the myth that the Copernican model was opposed because it was a blow to human pride, dethroning Earth from its privileged position as the center of the universe... (Scholar Dennis Danielson) points out that in the early 16th cenutry, the center of the universe was not considered a desirable place to be. "In most medieval interpretations of Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology, Earth's position at the center ofthe universe was taken as evidence not of its important but... its grossness."

In fact, ancient and medival Arabic, jewish and Christian scholars believe that the center was the worst part of the universe, a squalid basement where all the muck collected. One medieval writer described Earth's location as "the excrementary and filthy parts of the lower world." "We humans, " another asserted, are "lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and rivetted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, and the most remote from the heavenly arch." In 1615 Cardinal Robert bellarmine, a prominent persecutor of Galileo, said that "the Earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the center of the world."

In Dante's Divine Comedy, hell itself is placed in Earth's innermost core. Dante also speaks of hell in ways consistent with Aristotelian dynamics--not full of flames, which would be displaced skyward by the heavier Earth, but as frozen and immobile.

By contrast, heaven was up, and the further up you went, away from the center, the better it was. So Copernicus, by putting the sun at the center and Earth in orbit around it, was really giving its inhabitants a promotion by taking them closer to the heavens.

...The actual religious reaction to the heliocentric model also differs from folklore. For one thing, Copernicus did not seem to fear religious opposition to his ideas. After all, he was a reputable cleric himself. He even dedicated his book to Pope Paul III with a letter in which he apologized for the seemingly outlandishness of his suggestion that the Earth moved. He explained that he was forced to his hypothesis by the inadequacy of the Ptolemaic system for constructing calendars and predicting the positions of the stars. A cardinal and a bishop were among those who urged him to publish his book. In fact, for 60 years after Copernicus' death for just two months after its publication, De Revolutionibus was read and least partially taught at leading Catholic universities...

For many years after the publican of De Revolutionibus, while Copernicus' ideas remained within the mathematical astronomy community, authors of more popular books on astronomy and cosmology were either unaware of his work or chose to ignore it. A few nonastronomers did ridicule it--not for being heretical but for promulgating the patently absurd idea of a moving earth.

It was through popularizers, some of them poets, that Copernicus' ideas became more widely known and began to spark religious opposition. But here too, the actual history is surprising. Opposition arose initially among Protestant groups rather than from the Roman Catholic Church.

(Martin) luther spoke out against heliocentrism in 1539, saying that the idea of a moving Earth moving around a stationary Sun clearly went against the account in the book of Joshua that says Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still...

The conflict between scripture and Copernicanism was not limited to verses that involved the motion of Sun or Earth. The realization was growing that acceptance of Copernicanism raised other profound theological difficulties as well...the problems just kept multiplying:

(Kuhn: )" If... the Earth were merely one of six planets, how were the stories of the Fall and Salvation, with their immese bearing on Christian life, going to be observed?.. If the universe is infinite, as many of the latter Copernicans thought, where can God's Throne be located? In an infinite Universe, how is mant o find God or God man?"

As time went on, Copernicus' ideas were seen as seriously disturbing to Christianity; they had to be countered. Soon the Bible became the main weapon used against Copernicus... Religious bodies undertook what was essentially a propaganda war against Copernicus.

People started calling Copernicans infidels and atheists and urged their repression... What probably happened was that after the heliocentric model had been well established, the location of the Sun did come to be perceived as a privileged place. So people ready back into history the newly believed excellence of the center... The demotion idea may have been introduced as part of the effort to rally nonscientific religious people to turn against Copernicanism by appealing to their pride as human beings.

(The Catholic Church's) ban on Copernicus remained until 1822, and his book remained on the forbidden list until 1835. In fact it was only in 1992 that Pope John Paul II lifted the edict of inquisition against Galileo....

What can we learn from all this? The story of the Copernican revolution shows that the actual history of science often bears little resemblance to the popular capsule versions that are learned in school or college or portrayed in textbooks and the popular media. Steve Weinberg calls them "potted history." The true story is much more complicated, but it's also a lot more interesting.

diabolical views

I've only been here a few weeks, but at any given moment my mouth is hanging open, gaping at the crazy splash of fog and light and sea that nature throws at you. This is an incredibly beautiful city; I'm not sure that I've lived in a more stunning place in the world, although there were many beautiful moments in Los Angeles and New York. The air is fresh here too, incredibly so for a place like this, and we find ourselves constantly driving to mountaintops of which there are many.

We're tourists in the city we live in. People are always dropping by too; a friend we met in Berlin had been out of the country for six years with absolutely no visits inbetween. He's on this West Coast tour and we're having a lot of fun enjoying the crazy boisterous life in America. Only W can appreciate how weird and interesting America is, and he looks a little dazed, all this new information, all these incredible landscapes. We sit contemplating the Sonoma Valley, how beautiful it is, as the tour guide tells us tales of mega mergers and corporate distribution, and it's incredible how this small strip of land influences so much outside of its scope.

Most of the wineries we visit are not very exclusive, so they admit a certain kind of tourist like us, and we're fine with that, because I don't know enough about wine to know the difference between the really amazing stuff and the very ordinary. The really good places require guest lists and are quite particular; or so people say. i have no idea what it's really like. The guides are patient, treating us like very eager but stupid children, explaining in excruciating detail how to taste wine. It's not like we haven't done it before, but we've never had things laid out end to end.

There's this beautiful little Tuscan restaurant in downtown Sonoma with a huge poster of Lucca, and just like Lucca there are lots of little hokey touches to remind us that this is authentically Italian and indeed a family restaurant. Black and white photographs of grandma; when I went to Lucca the last time they did the same thing to assure us that everything was small-scale, even though they were more efficient and businesslike than they'd like to admit. The wineries in Sonoma are incredible stone affairs made to look like postcards from Italy, the driveways lined with incredible cypress trees.

A friend's family tells us where to go to get the very best South Indian food in the Bay Area, and they warned us that it would be packed, which it was--big brawling families and packs of tech workers and pairs of young men in North Face and preppy upturned collars.

They're working at these companies that we were always aware of when we were working in Berlin, addresses where important things were sent, where deals were made: Sunnyvale, San Jose, Cupertino, Mountain View... they're all mashed up next to each other at the south rim of the Bay.

Strangely enough, everyone's speaking English, and a wife lectures a couple facing her, "The wife makes these important decisions in the family," while juggling a child on her hip. I'm struggling to eat a dosa the right way, which is always the wrong way, and two guys next to me talk about some kind of industry stuff as a hovering waiter apologizes for my entree being later than my husband's. Everyone's teched out though, mothers pecking at very expensive new laptops and little girls mesmerized by their text messaging.

People my mother's age bike up incredibly steep hillsides, gray-haired women with incredibly muscular legs in designer bicycle wear, the logos and team jerseys from some faraway land across the sea, smiling good naturedly at us as we drive by. Everyone's invariably running, jogging or kayaking somewhere here. The uniform of the day is a hiking North Face jacket; if you're not careful you can go around being overdressed unless you're downtown, where you'll be spoiled by the slim and handsome shop boys in pinstripe suits smoking.

We drive to the highest mountain peak, Mount Diablo, which has the second clearest view in the world after Mount Kilimanjaro, and some bicycles are huffing and puffing up an incredible distance to the top, inadequately clothed in spandex. It's freezing up there, wind whipping you by, but you can run into the tower at the top for protection, which they do, or if you have a parka like me, stand on the cliff's edge and look down from what looks like an airplane's view.

We're always climbing peaks to get good views; from Mount Diablo San Francisco looks like my fingernail and the Golden Gate Bridge is nothing but a toy. As the sun sets, the mountain casts a long shadow across the valley below; I like to thing that if I point my hand upwards I'm creating night for hundreds of people. It's like playing God.

keep up the good fight

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

- Albert Einstein

control

just like everyone else in town, we went to see the ian curtis biopic control... in a lovely theater as well, small-screened with bright stars scattered across the ceiling.

sam riley, playing ian curtis, is absolutely stunning in a way men can be only before they turn 24, when men still have fragile dreams and can walk down the street as ladykillers in a slim suit.

ladies allow men a lot of leeway when they're like that. his behavior would simply be annoying if he were my age, paunchy and bloated from years of alcohol and drug abuse. it would also make no sense that the two women in his life would remain so attached.

and as far as music is concerned, movies like this love to celebrate the tortured, self-destructive artist. preferably young and really really hot.

in my life at work and at home, so many more brilliant things have been accomplished with group work, however tormented and chaotic it may be. i wouldn't say that working with a large group of international artists was one of the easier and smooth things i've done in my life--nothing will turn your hair grey than juggling many personalities, but it is usually worth it whether the project turns out to be a disaster or a success. bands and groups can be petty, small-minded and self-destructive, but there wouldn't be a wonderful underground in places like los angeles if the surface weren't so conservative. at least it's something to react against to make a positive change.

after the tragic end, i teased T with our ongoing joke over the years, "when you were in a band touring around different countries, did you have a lot of groupies?"

"No, never," he says with that mona lisa smile of his. "I didn't have any!"

"But you were the singer, don't they usually choose a pretty boy to be the singer?" My friends and I always say this, it's become ritual now. "Did they throw roses on the stage? Did they try to kiss you?"

"What are you talking about?" He never talks about these things, just like our friend B, who's a natural ladykiller and at ease with most all women and going around with three or four girls at a time who smother him with love. they're the kind of men that women gravitate to, and they feel no need to boast or obsess.

A old school r & b manager told me all his battle tales about musicians and artists he'd managed a decade ago. talk about dealing with groups of temperamental, difficult people! A huge problem was always the competition between two touring artists, especially if one got more girls than the other. "Some guys got it, they don't even have to try. And others don't. And they're just hatin on it--guys just hate that some other guy got it."

"I know. If a guy's got it, he doesn't talk about it. The guys that are always talking about chicks try so hard, and it doesn't work. No wonder they're frustrated. I wish I could make a magic potion to bottle it, it'd make me rich," i said. maybe even start up a company with the idea since i'm near silicon valley anyway.

it would put all the neurotic men's magazines out of business, with their pages and pages dedicated to acquiring the perfect six pack and bizarre "systems" for picking up "hot chicks." i read those at my gym every day, and they've made me really insecure about my own six pack which doesn't exist and whether or not my hair's thinning and if i've got a hot car--stop! too much psychosis! i always have to put those magazines down or i'll absorb the classic middle class male mid life criss by osmosis even though i'm a woman.

which brings me back to the original topic--not to mock the tragedy of ian curtis' life, but it just shows that women aren't really that different from men on the inside. it's just that i'm not ridiculously handsome and gangly enough to get away with murder...

harvest time sketch

large version

guardian angeles & the starlets of la la land

in the city of angels there are thousands of lost souls.

a beautiful guardian angel, plump and healthy with desire, watches over the hungry lanky girls who dream of being starlets, although sometimes they cannot save them before it's too late.

bay area love

how do you draw paradise?

sinking into paradise

I confess that although I have been reading a great deal, plowing through as many as two or three books a week, I haven't been drawing or painting as much as I'd like or even writing. Life is a constant social whirlwind as well as the realization that it takes some energy to get settled into a physical place, a city, and for some reason it's taking longer than usual to understand San Francisco's neighborhoods and geographies.

How can anyone live here without knowing that they are in paradise, or a strange, slightly flawed variant of heaven?

I mentioned the famous restaurant that I had visited the week before, the one that C wholeheartedly recommended and that people on the bus kept saying was worth the two hour wait. A friend from high school flew back into town, and she said that it was one of her old drinking buddies, and that she was staying with her.

We found ourselves in the sister restaurant down the street. During the heady days of the San Francisco internet boom they had both worked at start-ups as graphic designers... then when things went bust, one went to law school and the other bought the restaurant. "Damn!" said the lawyer half-jokingly, but for some reason I could see my good friend starting her own restaurant.

And it's such a different experience going to a place when the owner is hovering nearby, constantly asking how we liked the food. She fussed over where we would sit. The interior was gorgeous, modern and spare.

It was a large, talkative group that had lived all over the place and had travelled every which way. We ordered six or seven plates and I was told what went into what; the flavors exploded in my mouth. It was all about sharing tips about where to eat, because San Francisco is really, really about food, and not so much about nightlife or clubbing. Secret dining locations in the south bay were passed back and forth.

When we were finished, my friend brought out big plates of exquisite desserts from nearby gourmet bakeries. Then the owner came by, inspected what we ate and what was loved the most by our group, and I'm just beginning to realize how rough it is to run your own business, especially when it's something you're very passionate about, which is turning food into art. The two tall, strangely thin and elegant women exchanged comments. These are serious food lovers.

I tasted some Asian rice cake ice cream dessert swirled with condensed milk and I almost died and went to heaven, as stuffed as I was. It was also the first time I'd gotten so drunk on cocktails with swirls of mint. My Time Out guide says authoritatively that "If you can make it here in the restaurant business, you can make it anywhere" and that is so true!

There are such a multitude of cool ladies in this city. You don't see the tragedy in their eyes. They're filmmakers, not movie starlets; DJs, not groupies; photographers, not models. It makes me happy when people find their centers and build up from there.

A director gave us advice for travelling in our parents' countries. "Bring gifts, save up, but don't tell them you're there until the last minute." Otherwise we'd be corralled and locked into endless shopping trips and not be allowed to go anywhere unescorted. Show your love at the end of the trip, but don't tell anyone where you're going, or they'll be dying of worry, and you can just show up and show them that everything's ok!

bus advice

on the crowded express bus heading west from the financial district people peer over my shoulder.

on at least three separate occasions they say, "now that's a good restaurant." then we get into those nice personal yet not personal conversations about life and it's surprisingly how easily people yield tidbits of their life to you, especially when you expect something different considering this lot is dressed in suits, ties and business patent leather heels. i like the somber san francisco style, how pinstripes and black go so well in this city. and people read--they read big thick weighty books, so that at dinner parties there's something to actually talk about.

two people help me get off at just the right spot. a man says, "that whole street is amazing for asian food. from here to here." another woman says, "you're there just in time, but keep in mind that there's usually an hour's wait to eat there, no matter what day of the week it is." more voices join in, assenting, helping me out. "i just moved here too, and that's one of the best places in town."

then they're gone and out the bus door.

my friend C who had lived in india recommended it to me, and it lived up to its reputation. i cannot review food properly; the famous thirty billion ingredients salad was delightful! extravagant! each bite was an explosion of taste. i guess the difference between good food and excellent food is in the subtleties.

next to me a college student babbled to his parents about his plans, and about his day job at a restaurant, and it was such a reverse of a relationship i expected from a rebellious young art student. his parents were loving, heavy people from the suburbs of d.c. and they discussed his options for his life and the summer. they patiently sat through his slightly condescending explanations of the neighborhoods of the city and what kind of food they were eating. there's this patience that the middle-aged have for the very young.

the man on the bus was correct; it's an impressive street. you're struck by how Asian San Francisco is. At night the air is very cold, very clear and pure, air coming in from the ocean and cleansed by the saltwater.

printmaking in the east bay

emory douglas


emmanuel montoya


miriam stahl


carolyn pennypacker riggs

Bay Area Love

Of all the places I have lived, coming to San Francisco has been the most immediately familiar. I keep running into people from my long-lost past here--not just once in a while but twice in a week, unplanned, but who else would be rummaging through the library on a Saturday early morning?

It's a long story, but I used to write to M and read his books and magazines, and his thoughts were greatly inspiring. After a weird cross-country journey we hung out, and it was so nice to share thoughts and nothing else. We've met several times in various cities and countries over the years--in Europe and New York City over the years, although most of the times we spoke we were stressed out and had no time for a meaningful conversation.

And to just run into someone and ask them questions and randomly talk about stuff levelly, it's such a nice pleasure! Maybe that's one of my favorite things of all, just sitting and talking to people. I was also very young and obsessive at the time, but meeting him helped me to discover and create a great many cool things.

It takes a long time to get past a certain comfort zone, and with some friends I've had years, so that you pass the boundary where you are acquaintances, and then when your hair turns gray you can really get to know each other.

The most favorite pleasure in the Bay Area is eating though, and nobody I've met has considered dieting. They're always talking about food here, but they're paradoxically thinner on average than the people always talking about dieting I encountered in Southern California.

The bread is as good as the bread in Germany, and I've been stuffing myself with cheese, cakes and fruits nonstop at countless dinner parties, because that's what you do when you get old and gray.

There's moderation when drinking the wine, and it shows (the moderation), because you want people to eat, not acquire that neurotic, sinewy health freak body with the veins bulging and the sun-damaged skin weathered and leathery from time.

And when your friendships grow and ripen, and you have so many common experiences in so many places, it's like harvest time. People returning to California after many years in South America, you need to have conversations that are deep and meaty, and you--well maybe it's just me, acquaintances that blossom into friendships that are going to feed you for many years to come.

los angeles farewell

There are so many interesting characters in Los Angeles, you could spend a lifetime sitting down meeting each of them, and it's my bad luck that I met some of the most compelling people right before I left.

My going away ceremonies were huge affairs, and I realize now that I was very lucky to know so many of the right kind of people, the kind who help you hold your center and make you become a better person. I encountered so many lonely transplants in L.A. who had only sketchy acquaintances after many years, and it was only through the good will of many cool friends that I was able to see the nooks and crannies and secrets that I saw in my time there.

I'll miss K's dark humor and wit and encyclopedic knowledge about every nook and cranny of the neighborhoods and history of the city. There was the shiny, brilliant choreographer with her troupe of dancing boys, this center of so much creativity and passion. I was introduced and spoke to her for only moments, but there are certain women who glow so charismatically, the center of so many great things. There was L, who I rarely saw, because it's impossible to run into people randomly in that place, organizing her shows and propelling things forward. The young men working forward with his projects and creating grand parties and girls with sharp minds who know it's better to D.J. than be a model any day.

I wish I had time to sit down alone with each of them, share a few weekends working on something interesting, because I truly do find people fascinating, and there are so many great minds at work in a metropolis like L.A. It's just that in that world, so much is hidden, and the cream doesn't often rise to the top, although once in a while it does.

It really does. I know this because I saw Julie Delphy from a short distance, one in which I could have called out her name and she would have heard me and looked at my face. But I was content to simply watch her laugh and talk with the make-up artists, oozing class even though she was sloppily dressed in jeans and horn-rimmed glasses for a television interview. It makes me happy that someone like that would be famous, yet stay so true and bright.

first rainbow

I picked up my friend from the fancy hotel where she was staying downtown. She had been flown in to speak, and I always feel proud when these things happen. I had known her quite a long time, and when you count through the years, and it's so encouraging to see that she's never lost steam.

It never rains in Los Angeles so it was a complete shock when there were thunderstorm clouds on the horizon. The sound of raindrops was completely foreign to me after six months in this desert.

When we first met we sat in a cafe in New York, and weren't we children? This time meeting we went to a cafe in Los Angeles picking at huge pastries and coffee. Even with everyone so thin, the croissants stay huge, larger than my head. When we had first met, I hadn't travelled around at all, and I wouldn't notice this, but somehow the essence of both of us remained the same.

Later on I found her in a maze of the strange Disneyland streets of Chinatown. It's all about pagodas and Chinese lanterns there , but it has an undeniable prettiness even when surrendering to kitsch. She's so dazzling, my friend is, one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. If you look back in life and at all of the choices and turns, there are so many instances when things could have turned out differently; but in this instance she was shining.

I like speeches and bare white stages. There was a video projection; I had a hard time following what most of the speakers were talking about that night, but she made the most sense. It had been a while since I had been to something to just sit and think for the sake of thinking.

But the whole crowd spilling onto the wet streets was there not only to think but to have fun. And to parade like peacocks--it was the best fashion I'd ever seen in all my time in Southern California, where it's normal to see beautiful young women dressed unironically like Joan Collins. Is that why people age so quickly here? My friend looks so young still, and so do I, and it's such a strange thing because we eschew facial peels and mud masks. Something about the air in L.A. artificially ages people, or is it all that sunlight? Men and women under thirty are supertanned and trim, their faces lined, moving forward more quickly, speeding up to the pace of light.

Everyone on this particular street was absolutely striking on this night, fluttering about with gossamer wings, although we laughed that the slight dip in temperatures had people in too-hot peacoats and black tights. In Germany men would be walking around in t-shirts and shorts, that's how brave they are about the weather. I felt like I was in the middle of a Vogue magazine spread.

One of her friends came with her baby to hear her speak. She was one of those women who had chosen life: she was a bright and happy mommy full of life. Sometimes you can see through the pretenses and know instantly when people are happy, and this was one of them. She had to leave early because the baby was acting up, but that's how a mother should be--upright and happy, someone to lean on, eating up food voraciously just like she'd eat up life.

I felt a swell of pride again as my friend answered the questions, her mind so sharp. There are so many points where things could have turned out differently: maybe she wouldn't have written a book, maybe she wouldn't be a speaker here today and I wouldn't get this delicious slice of time to hang out with her. You can choose life or you can choose something else, but I prefer to keep company with women who choose life. She bought me a dinner and we ate huge mounds of noodles, our cheeks filling out.

I stood on the street at one point and looked up and saw something wonderful. There it was, hanging in the sky, my first L.A. rainbow. Without rain, you don't get rainbows.

peace love and happiness to all

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

- einstein

dreams from the void: cowgirl & ghost woman

age of consent

from Rainer Maria Rilke's notebooks:

I think I ought to begin to do some works now that I am learning to see. I am 28 years old, and almost nothing has been done. To recapitulate, I have written a study on Carpaccio, which is bad, a drama entitled "Marriage" which sets out to demonstrate something false by equivocal means, and some verses. Ah! But verses amount to so little when one writes them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one night be able to write ten verses that are good. For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (those one has early enough), -they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things, one must know animals, the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming, to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else), to childhood illnesses that begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars--and it is not yet enough if one may thing of all this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white sleeping women in childbeds, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must have been able to fget them when they are many and one must have great patience to wait until the come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves not til then can it happent hat in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

kluster magazine (thanks miss mel!)

Miss Mel interviewed me in the art issue of kluster magazine
Check it out!

I'm missing those crazy australian girls, and all the Berlin crowd in general...

poems of wallace stevens

THE EMPREROR OF ICE-CREAM
by Wallace Stevens

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb,
Let the lamb affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

A POSTCARD FROM THE VOLCANO
by Wallace Stevens

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with out bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds below
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

skully girl

all of these little pen and ink sketches have to become either a big drawing or a painting soon. i love my moleskin, but the art has to start living outside of its box soon.

truman capote: breakfast at tiffany's

Late one afternoon, while waiting for a Fifth Avenue bus, I noticed a taxi stop across the street to let out a girl who ran up the steps of the 42nd Street public library. She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make. I let curiosity guide me between the lions, debating on the way whether I should admit following her or pretend coincidence. In the end I did neither, but concealed myself some tables away from her in the general reading room, where sh sat behind her dark glasses and a fortress of literature she'd gathered at the desk. She sped from one book to the next, intermittently lingering on a page, always with a frown, as if it were printed upside down. She had a pencil poised above paper--nothing seemed to catch her fancy, still now and then, as though for the hell of it, she made laborious scribblings. Watching her, I remembered a girl I'd known in school, agrind, Mildred Grossman. Mildred: with her moist hair and greasy spectacles, her stained fingers that dissected frogs and carried coffee to picket lines, her flat eyes that only turned toward the stars to estimate their chemical tonnage. Earth and air could not be more opposite than Mildred and Holly, yet in my head they acquired a Siamese twinship, and the thread of thought that had sewn them together ran like this: the average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul--desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change. All right, here were two people who never would. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They would never change because they'd been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, lead to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic. I imagined them in a restaurant of the future, Mildred still studying the menu for its nutritional values, Holly still gluttonous for everything on it. It would never be different. They would walk through life and out of it with the same determined step that took small notice of those cliffs at the left. Such profound observations made me forget where I was; I cam to, startled to find myself in the gloom of the library, suprised all over again to see Holly there. It was after seven, she was freshening her lipstick and perking up her appearance from what she deemed correct for a library to what, by adding a bit of scarf, some earrings, she considered suitable for the Colony. When she'd left, I wandered over to the table where her books remained: they were what I had wanted to see. South by Thunderbird, Byways of Brazil, the Political Mind of Latin America. And so forth.

--Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

the bordello

The Bordello is one of my official favorite places in Los Angeles now. I went to see Miss C. of the Finches sing. She's such a beautiful songbird, and how can any man not instantly fall into an instant crush with her? They all do, even in Berlin they did.

Like many of my friends here, that's where we met. I was dirty and covered in paint and we were in this filthy but wonderful silkscreen print studio, and it was very cold and gray that year and I didn't even realize she was American and that much younger than me until we started talking. Appearances are deceiving! That was a really weird time, and we were thrown into the mix with lots of freaks from all sorts of countries and earnest Germans running the workshop with the loose happiness of part time kindergarden teachers.

That place is still going, run on good will and cheap rent by generous building owners. The whole street corner where it's at is one of those hot nightspots in Berlin that will stop being interesting in a few years, or maybe not. I'm not a horrible snob about these kinds of things, but there's definitely a sense of energy and accomplishment in many places and in other places there is not. That street corner is still going in Berlin long after much of Mitte has died. And it's still the kind of place where if you stand on a corner at four in the morning long enough with some guests from Brazil, a pack of French girls covered in mud will appear and start talking about falling off their bicycles and charm everyone into falling in love with them. It's not the kind of thing many people are looking for, but for those who want to live their life with a degree of magic, it's the kind of thing you treasure forever.

So lovely miss C, here and now in Los Angeles: There was a slight technical problem, and then she went into the most deadpan, hilarious little story about East Coast frat boys on a yacht diving through the innards of a dead whale.

We were in a booth with a glammed-up girl, and as the Bordello used to be, well, a bordello, the womblike hole encouraged us to talk about very racy and saucy topics. How many people would want to listen in on the things we say?

That place is just so feminine and pretty, although I can say that the corsets the waitresses wore were (for me) decidedly not so sexy. I would rather have women like in the paintings on the wall; heavy saucy women with dark hair and heavy make-up and low-cut white blouses.
I can only take one drink at a time; they had midori sours. Those were the only drinks I got used to, I used to order them all the time in Manhattan, but only one. They don't like cocktails so much in Berlin, although it's growing, especially with young yuppie girls.

K. commented that it was astounding how little light all the red chadeliers gave off. I love seeing people in the dark. As I've said before, people look better in the dark, clothed. On the beach and in clothes too revealing, it's lacking in mystery.

All that on the surface, that's what people catch when they're in Los Angeles. That's why you have hole up in the dark here for a few months until you discover all these little secrets: recording studios with basketball courts and old-fashioned microphones and tucked-away parties where everyone looks like they come from Europe and massive tiki bars in the middle of suburbialand full of flourescent fish tanks. That's when it's David Lynchland.

in those years by adrienne rich

In Those Years
by adrienne rich

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and, yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through rages of fog
where we stood, saying I

Seven Years by Aaron Cometbus

the root of the matter

remembering

I spent a good weekend with miss s., as we had not seen each other in many years. It's so strange how so much time outside of the country seems to be as if no time had passed at all; was it all a dream? I still miss my Berlin friends a great deal, and photographs and e-mails are nothing compared to real-life conversations and hand-holding. Miss S. had been a series of e-mails and chats over the years, and it was so gratifying to see her in person again as she stayed at my house.

We ran around the city like little children, stuffing our faces at the Thai Temple with m. and feeling like we were in another country, and then lazing around in the Museum of Jurassic Technology to escape the intense summer heat. We were there for hours and hours. It's a place to get lost in, one of the true jewels of Los Angeles, full of renaissance theater dioramas and an exhibit dedicated to the mobile home of America. Yet another example of the L.A. David Lynch world.

We walked the long strip of boardwalk between Santa Monica and Venice Beach. It was at this point that we started talking about a common acquaintance, and she was shocked when I told her that he had passed away. It had been a tragic situation as well. Young men of our generation should not be going so quickly like this; I remember him as a genuinely good person but also very brilliant and moody. He was not so much a friend of mine as he was of hers; in fact, she was intending on mailing him back some movies next week when she got to her parents' house. She didn't believe me at first.

With so many years spent apart from the ones you love, living great distances, you get worried.
You have to hold the people who are important to you close. She was very sad, and we went on the swingsets, surrounded by European tourists and people babbling so many languages at once. It wasn't so much fun... You know, there are so many interesting people on the beach. I could just sit there and watch them until the end of time, but things shut down there at sunset.

Later, our feet blistered and overwhelmed by the sun, we made our way back to the car. "I can't believe it," she said. This is something we will all have to get used to as we get older, friends passing away.

I just can't imagine what it would be like to be left entirely alone, everyone from your past gone from the earth, like those hundred year olds. What is that like? People from your youth are so important, or at least that's what I think lately, and I am fortunate that there are so many of them here in Los Angeles, because they ground me.

jeans & heels

"Wow, everyone here is so conventionally attractive," I blurted out, and my friends laughed, because I know that it can be taken the wrong way, but it wasn't meant in any mean sense. We sat in a happy little circle in my first really West Hollywood goings-on place, and it was nice to just sink into the sofa watching all the pretty butterflies and birds go by.

It's fascinating to sit next to people blatantly on their first date. You overhear so much. The awkwardness is amazing, but some people are smooth hands at it. Sometimes I feel that if it really means anything, it's always going to be awkward. If you're smooth at falling in love and at saying the right thing at the right time all the time, perhaps you've been around the corner too much. Love is this uncontrollable, awful monster that needs to be reined in and controlled, sometimes even purposely destroyed, especially if it occurs at inappropriate times. But the more you try to push it back, the more it fights back, and then you're just left with this mess of an animal, and you just have to close your eyes and wish for it to go away soon!

The woman was so shy but she was so eager, offering herself up at the bat, her bosom overflowing in her dress, but she wasn't tacky. It was the kind of place where girls where heels with their jeans. She had this long straight pretty blonde hair that reminded me of the nice girls I went out with when I was in Hamburg, how they were always very proper and sexy about the way they dressed, they were nice girls going to art school or working at advertising agencies at their first jobs. She kept inching closer and closer to the guy, who seemed attracted but not too eager, and we couldn't help but listen in on their conversation, which was composed of nothing and completely insubtantial because it was all in the body language.

So we were a group of three, two girls and a boy, and the boy was also watching two women sitting at our table with their backs to us. One woman had a very interesting nose, or so he said, and we were trying to figure out a way for him to go up to her and talk to her. We had all had too many martinis (for me just one is enough--I can't handle alcohol and never will), and they had two or three each, but for some reason they maintained a strange calm.

"How are you going to talk to her without it being false or confusing or contrived?" I wondered.

"Just drink a lot and then go up to her," K. said. But that's the kind of thing girls always say to boys who are stepping upt ot he plate.

"That would be scary," I said.

"Oh no, it's not so bad. I'm good at it," he said, but at that moment when they say things like that, you know that they're not really that good at it and even when they don't show it they're prepping themselves up.

It was by far the place with the (conventionally) prettiest people I'd been to so far in Los Angeles. It was actually nice being at a place without boys in skinny jeans, although some of the women were so thin that their clavicles jutted and they looked a few years older than they probably were. Starvation does that to you. The men could get away with exposing less because they were all in dress shirts, but they had different sets of expectations from the women, as in being cute and charming at the same time but not too much, and being somewhat well off and promising, which meant earning a bit of money, but not waving it around too much.

This whole dating ritual mystifies me and continues to do so. My Belgian friend once said that she never does this kind of thing, it's such a weird American ritual. But then she got her impressions of dating from those MTV reality shows they air in Belgium, where women prance around in bikinis trying to get eligible bacehlors, or tv spots on speed dating.

I guess they do dating in europe too, because i knew a bunch of merry girls who worked on an online dating portal. There are many interesting things to say about that, but I wouldn't mention it here or anywhere really, because it's important to be discreet.

When we left the place the two girls were there, one of them miss nose. Our friend was still trying to figure out a way to speak to her. He chalked it up as a missed opportunity as we left, but he didn't seem to be in the mood to get his hopes up, and he didn't like her as much as he thought. I was wondering if I should go talk to miss nose for him.

But then it was also the case where one relationship had ruined his life forever and so on, and it had not so much to do with the girl herself as the particular time and place in which it happened. You can't really blame so much of your tragedy on most other people, not even your parents, but we all have one of those disastrous relationships which sends us into fits of depression for years down the road. I think it's always interesting that these kinds of peoples are the ones you should avoid for a while, but the ones who always try to get in touch with you at bad times.

You're just so horribly curious, and people who knew you when you were young are the ones to keep close to your side, isn't that what they say? Dorothy parker said, "Every love's the older love in a duller dress." She was such a horrible cynic though. She couldn't see the fun in Los Angeles, not like I can, although I think we can sense the darknesses, or she could and I can. It's the dark sides that make it so interesting though!

the curse of beauty

at this age, i realize how fortunate I am not to have been born beautiful. when i was younger it would have been a case of sour grapes if I had said something like this. but no, while i am happy with who i am, it's been really to my benefit that beauty hasn't encased itself around me and made me something i wouldn't want to be.

beauty is a wonderful thing, but it is also such a horrible curse. it attracts the wrong kind of attention from even the best kinds of people, and there is so much potential for it to go wrong. it's also after a certain point perpetually declining...

a male model told me recently that men are better suited for modelling because beauty in men is seen as an asset to other great qualities, while in women it's seen as the only thing.

On the other hand, I know quite a few women of worth and standing who are beautiful, intelligent, and accomplished. Maybe they somehow avoided the pitfalls of beauty by being around the right kinds of people at the right time.

tea time training

• Ladies, always pay attention to the honey. If you're not careful, it will somehow escape your scone and fall onto your new pants, creating a drippy trail that looks like a snail crawled up your calf.
• A sherry makes you tipsy and loosens the lips. Gossip material soon follows.
• Clothes should be pretty but never too comfortable so that you're slouching and relaxing too much. Don't gawk at the women in the gold lame pantsuits.
  
• Always use the strainer or when you're talking about something scandalous, little tea lives will hang out of the side of your mouth.
• Eat as many cakes as you can, but delicately. Enter bitter, leave sweet!
  

holly's song

Also, she had a cat and she played the guitar. On days when the sun was strong, she would wash her hair, and together with the cat, a red tiger-striped tom, sit out on the fire escape thumbing a guitar while her hair dried. Whenever I heard the music, I would go stand quietly by my window. She played very well, and sometimes sang too. Sang in the hoarse, breaking tones of a boy's adolescent voice. She knew all the show hits, Cole Porter and Kurt Weill; especially she liked the songs from Oklahoma! which were new that summer and everywhere. But there were moments when she played songs that made you wonder where she learned them, where indeed she came from. Harsh-tender wandering tunes with words that smacked of pineywoods or prairie. One went: Don't wanna sleep, Don't wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky; and this one seemed to gratify her the most, for often she continued long after her hair had dried, after the sun had gone and there were lighted windows in the dusk.

-- truman capote, breakfast at tiffany's