Louise Nayer's amazing account of the tragic explosion that occured in her early childhood has been published -- and you can order your copy: http://www.louisenayer.com/
Friday, February 05, 2010
Buy BURNED
Louise Nayer's amazing account of the tragic explosion that occured in her early childhood has been published -- and you can order your copy: http://www.louisenayer.com/
Thursday, February 04, 2010
New Green
A big event to no-one but me in my little domicile....I had a great variety of plants that I nurtured on the balcony at my previous apartment building. I had to pass most of them on to a pleasant young couple in that building. In the new building I found I had very little light for the four plants I brought along. The maidenhair fern thrives in this light, but the bonzai I had nurtured for years was finally down to two leaves, then one leaf, then was irrefutably DEAD. But a guy at the local nursery recommended the first plant below (I need to get the name) that looks so glossy but requires no light and very little water, and my friend Kenneth recommended the second plant, a spathipyllum, which looks nice against Martha Hubert's painting -- and I am happy again with these new companions. Plants being my only pets, I feel less alone!
Monday, February 01, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
A Brief Visit to the deYoung Museum, San Francisco
CLICK ON TITLE ABOVE TO SEE A BRIEF SLIDE SHOW -- a brief visit to the deYoung Museum to see the exhibit of Amish quilts -- and took a few other photos besides. In order, glass sculpturs by Nicolas Africano, Mary Ann Zynsky, Dale Chihuly; woven basket by Honda Syoryu; Mayan figures; etc.
Monday, January 11, 2010
For Those in the Turtle Tribe
Earth and Its History
Earth island slid about – a turtle
that began a journey of millenniums;
it split into continents that lowered
arms to make peninsulas, with beaches.
Where the land spread and cracked,
rain created lakes. Oceans begat,
along each drifting continent,
the lacey edge of bays and inlets.
Now all wait for the great turtle’s return –
a Oneness that none on earth may see again –
a longed-for perfect fit that might reunite
and reveal the original earth – Pangaea.
Sweet search in every person – Why do we
wait? Children of the Turtle, we are whole,
while divided, complete in the great Heart
revealed because the Earth fell apart.
– James McColley Eilers
copyright 2010
Saturday, December 26, 2009
COYOTE
CLICK on title above to see a slide show of a few photos of the Coyote I met in December 2009.
People seemed to like this email I sent out...
...so I guess I should add it to my blog.
In the brief midwinter, we dare to celebrate. Today, after tai chi, and after the breakfast we have after tai chi, we sat for a long time in the garden at the Crossroads Cafe, which usually contains families with children who play safely in that enclosed and friendly space. I noticed a big family around one table, clearly a warm and intelligent bunch of humans, and from their conversation, it was clear that they were Jewish. Code Pink friends arrived with rectangles of cloth on which we were to write appropriate and positive words as they would then be strung on lines, as with Tibetan prayer cloth that are hung out to endure all weather until they disintegrate. These lines of "prayers" -- our efforts to create positive, healing sentiments -- are to be taken with a large contingent of Code Pink women about to make another trip into Gaza. For example, one of mine read: "Two Nations, One Hope: Peace."
Soon the sweet children from the Jewish family came over and wanted to know what we were doing and why, and they asked if they could also make some of the prayer cloths, and soon we were one group, writing messages, drawing, discussing what colors to use, the children outstripping us in the number of prayer cloths they made and making creative suggestions, coming up with their own messages, one girl calling for justice on one that she created. As you may can surmise, it was a moment of serendipity -- one that could not have been arranged or predicted -- a sweet gathering. It was wonderful to see children eager to participate in such a task, and more understanding of peace, perhaps, than those they were helping, so adult and overwrought. Something that could be and ought to be perfectly "natural" drew us into its circle, the circle that is so seldom completed with such felicity.
To wish that we all might have a luminous and illuminating Winter Solstice, I am calling back to life a Winter Solstice drawing from many years ago where this grinning fellow seems to be giddy, having a peace dove on his brain!
In the brief midwinter, we dare to celebrate. Today, after tai chi, and after the breakfast we have after tai chi, we sat for a long time in the garden at the Crossroads Cafe, which usually contains families with children who play safely in that enclosed and friendly space. I noticed a big family around one table, clearly a warm and intelligent bunch of humans, and from their conversation, it was clear that they were Jewish. Code Pink friends arrived with rectangles of cloth on which we were to write appropriate and positive words as they would then be strung on lines, as with Tibetan prayer cloth that are hung out to endure all weather until they disintegrate. These lines of "prayers" -- our efforts to create positive, healing sentiments -- are to be taken with a large contingent of Code Pink women about to make another trip into Gaza. For example, one of mine read: "Two Nations, One Hope: Peace."
Soon the sweet children from the Jewish family came over and wanted to know what we were doing and why, and they asked if they could also make some of the prayer cloths, and soon we were one group, writing messages, drawing, discussing what colors to use, the children outstripping us in the number of prayer cloths they made and making creative suggestions, coming up with their own messages, one girl calling for justice on one that she created. As you may can surmise, it was a moment of serendipity -- one that could not have been arranged or predicted -- a sweet gathering. It was wonderful to see children eager to participate in such a task, and more understanding of peace, perhaps, than those they were helping, so adult and overwrought. Something that could be and ought to be perfectly "natural" drew us into its circle, the circle that is so seldom completed with such felicity.
To wish that we all might have a luminous and illuminating Winter Solstice, I am calling back to life a Winter Solstice drawing from many years ago where this grinning fellow seems to be giddy, having a peace dove on his brain!
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
A Personal Letter to Everyone
Reading 50-year-old letters I am discovering in old storage boxes that have surfaced because of the fire that forced me to move from one apartment building to another, I remember that people used to write letters, and that much was lost when emails replaced letter writing. As I understand it, people who "Facebook" and "twitter" must limit what they say to a small count of characters, and must even amputate words. Should I assume they are contact with his because it sufficient space for what little they have to say, although they already save so much time eating Fast Food
As a 90-year-old woman poet said on the News Hour recently, "I like to write longhand. It puts my body into the work." It is the same with letter writing. Where you are as you write the letter, the seconds go by like the flow of ink from the pen; writing by hand (as I did with this before typing it up) places you in the flow of real time, organic time, and so you write very much about what is happening in the living momentt. Just now the sun is falling on the green moons of a large begonia...
in this house full of plants as various as the garden around the house (the house where I am about to housesit and catsit).
As I read and prepare to contact the people who wrote those letters 50 years ago, I am tempted to quote some of the great thoughts and poetic turns of phrase and the beautiful rhetoric that flows out as they were carried along by the flow of ink from a pen. Outside the window here (where I should pay THEM to housesit), there are always a crowd of greenback goldfinches clinging to special long sock of seeds designed to feed finches in particular.
There is frequently no space left on the red plastic saucer that feeds six hummingbirds at a time. Hmmm, I just got it -- the sound when you are around them is of the constant humming of their wings -- You see? Writing long hand has made me slow enough to finally hear the hum of hummingbirds...
Some of the irridescent birds seem clearly to be the Black-Chinned Hummingbird I find in a bird book.
There is also the bird feeder for larger birds, but all the birds, large or small, scatter when the scrub jay hits the feeder like blue lightning, pecks up a few seeds, then rushes off again as if it were the creature most hounded by fears:
One of the owners of this house and of their cat Lucky is still at his job in the city, while the other is doing last minute work in the back of the house on his computer, so this room with windows onto the garden is quiet and sunny, a tapestry of autumn colors outside, but also the virant blue of the plumbago at the door...
The apple tree is a pleasing blend of green and gold leaves, the apples themselves as gold as myth against the blue sky.
From the bedroom where I sleep when I visit or housesit for these wonderful friends, I see radiant autumn colors and the bright yellow gift of the December cycle of lemons.
The last of the yellow roses burn in the dusk.
On a walk near sunset last night I came upon the local congress of crows that congregates, skitterish, in various dead oaks, ever debating over place, full of loud purpose.
This morning I heard I single crow above me when I stepped out under the tall pine tree; in a voice like a squeaky wooden screw turning in a wooden screw hole, it called out ag, ag, ag-ag. A crow some distance to the west echoed with precisely the same call: ag, ag, ag-ag. A crow about the same distance, but to the north, called ag ag, ag-ag. They were triangulating the territory. They repeated the same “cawl” in the same directional order for the brief time I listened – marking the borders of a territory, triangular in shape? Calling out the location of the dangerous human? Does anyone know the language of the crow? (I supposedly have a drop of Crow Indian in my DNA, but it doesn't seem to help.)
Lucky, sleeping nearby, moans in his sleep the same as a lonely hman may whimper in his sleep from lack of love, with a sad desire. A letter,ike the time it takes to let the ink flow from a pen, may tap into Now's slow time where small things are noticed, and are worth noticing. The flowers in a room, dropping petals, may seem as important as the cries of crowds caught up in cruel rapid fire somewhere and shown on the daily news, the ongoing tragedy.
Write someone a letter.
This kawing koncatenation in the midst of kalm (how the K sound saws at things) provokes a particular memory -- Why? -- and I will go on now computer, having finished typing the letter I had written by hand -- I guess the computer unleashes a different kind of talk. Dealing with the move after the fire in my old apartment building led to many days or weeks of being intensely present to deal with an endless number of challenges and complications; then, abruptly, I am opening up decades-old storage boxes, from which ghosts fly out, and I am then traveling, by these letters, back fifty years in time. Something about this sudden upheaval, or clash of times, or this dipping suddenly into the calm of the countryside, able to stop and take a breath, along with the daily witnessing of the shallow lives walking through the debris of outdated values where Americans are persuaded to live with this week's new electronic toy, or distract themselves with some other shallow pastime, has led me to a particular memory. I guess because it touched in 1960 on a social illness that has persisted from then until now.
When I was a soldier boy wandering the streets of various cities, in San Francisco a sweet African American man took me in for a day or a day and a night -- I don't remember exactly -- but I won't say "picked me up," although there was sweet lovemaking . No, in fact, he treated me like a fellow human being, with intelligent conversation, and kindness, and so did his mother who welcomed me as if I were not a stranger and made lunch for both of us, in no way resembling the current stereotype of the church-going African American who despises homosexuals. But that was the other San Francisco, the one that used to exist. No-one who living here then (I can almost feel confident that it is a generality with a great deal of truth) was judgemental toward anyone else (well, maybe out where Dan White was growing up). That was before world publicity very thoroughly trampled that San Francisco, left it behind as an earlier geological stratum, and was replaced by this later San Francisco (where the people of that former San Francisco can no longer afford to live! -- It's O.K., I prefer Oakland now).
In that sweet time, the lithe and loving African-American man insisted on sending me off with a valuable gift, It was not in my nature to distrust someone because of the color of the skin, and a good thing for that because I was thereby able to enjoy the company of a loving nature and received a special gift from the man, a gift that seemed rather ironic considering that people associated African-Americans with violence, yet he gave me the key to why violence exists, insisting that I accept it as a gift -- the slim volume of J. Bronowski's THE FACE OF VIOLENCE. J. Bronowski had some strange attitudes in one long television series he made, but this book on the causes of violence should not languish as it has.
In our current world of short messages punched out with one finger, individual thought and feeling has as much value as bird droppings even to those having those thoughts and feelings.
Allow me a brief aside before I return to Bronowski. I was a journalism major my first three semesters in college, which required me at one point to research the history of my hometown paper. Like most small town papers, the Nappanee Advance News was not, in spite of its name, prescient -- able to write the news in "advance" of it happening; in fact, it lacked news almost entirely. It had become little more than ads for sales, with a few brief personal news items. But I found in the library archives that at its beginning in the mid-1800s, the hometown newspaper was a forum for ideas and debate, and the participants in those discussions were intelligent and informed. Through their newspapers, small towns had what Bronowski calls small or local Centers of Recognition by which every individual citizen had a worthwhile and recognized identity, and with the strength of that identity found something to say and tried to make it worth saying because there was a place where someone would hear them say it.
All that was replaced, with a deflation of local identity by Centers of Recognition that became only national or global. Now, the only degree of recognition acknowledged to be of any real value is "celebrity," and hordes are chasing it like whippets at a racetrack chasing the mechanical rabbit.
Bronowski's notion that recognition of each individual, providing them a sense of identity, is a notion that should not be dismissed as too simple or too obvious, but celebratedd for being so simple and obvious -- and yet people appear to still be puzzled by the causes of violence. Nothing hurts an individual soul more than a sense of having no identity (regardless of how the comfortable and secure may have a philosopical regard for the value of a concept of "non-being," or spiritual thinkers treasure the "still center" of "emptiness"). Without awareness of the social need for local centers of recognition, the only recognition is "celebrity" (It is like everyone voting conservative with the delusion that they will one day be rich), so the only way the human of average talent or means can achieve this inflated notion of identity is by killing a celebrity or a well-known person, or, on a smaller scale, killing on a scale that will assure a place in the national news. No matter what else the motivation, the desire to really feel they exist is behind the violence. Along with the names of assassinated people that you had loved and respected, you know the names of their assassins, who have thereby achieved celebrity, or, rather, have stolen a well-known identity that they can wear then as if it were naturally their own.
And how does any gang member, anticipating no life of note beyond adolescence, achieve identity-- through violence. The daily news is easy to understand in the light of Bronowski's observation. To lose your job or be fired or be divorced may cause some individual to feel they have lost their identity, and, clamber insanely to get it back like a drowning man trying to reach the life-saving ring.
That was the key I was shown 50 years ago that I have seen no-one in power or influence to consider how to resolve the ongoing violence experienced by a population that feels invisible and powerless; few, like Conrad's sailors, can see the beauty in a "glorious and obscure fate."
Should I believe that television talent shows and reality TV shows are some effort at democracy -- or still the delusion of "celebrity"? How about the individual centers of recognition that are Internet forums, or blogs and websites? How about the Blue Elephant? Does he exist? Ha! He laughs, content to be a cloud. If you believe in the existence of the man naked inside the diaphanous cloud of his Blue Elephant costume -- avert your eyes! And do nothing but enjoy your own life...I close with this ironic "Merry Kitschmas" -- There is too much of this across the U.S.A. -- How many are willing to call this Beauty?:
As a 90-year-old woman poet said on the News Hour recently, "I like to write longhand. It puts my body into the work." It is the same with letter writing. Where you are as you write the letter, the seconds go by like the flow of ink from the pen; writing by hand (as I did with this before typing it up) places you in the flow of real time, organic time, and so you write very much about what is happening in the living momentt. Just now the sun is falling on the green moons of a large begonia...
in this house full of plants as various as the garden around the house (the house where I am about to housesit and catsit).
As I read and prepare to contact the people who wrote those letters 50 years ago, I am tempted to quote some of the great thoughts and poetic turns of phrase and the beautiful rhetoric that flows out as they were carried along by the flow of ink from a pen. Outside the window here (where I should pay THEM to housesit), there are always a crowd of greenback goldfinches clinging to special long sock of seeds designed to feed finches in particular.
There is frequently no space left on the red plastic saucer that feeds six hummingbirds at a time. Hmmm, I just got it -- the sound when you are around them is of the constant humming of their wings -- You see? Writing long hand has made me slow enough to finally hear the hum of hummingbirds...
Some of the irridescent birds seem clearly to be the Black-Chinned Hummingbird I find in a bird book.
There is also the bird feeder for larger birds, but all the birds, large or small, scatter when the scrub jay hits the feeder like blue lightning, pecks up a few seeds, then rushes off again as if it were the creature most hounded by fears:
One of the owners of this house and of their cat Lucky is still at his job in the city, while the other is doing last minute work in the back of the house on his computer, so this room with windows onto the garden is quiet and sunny, a tapestry of autumn colors outside, but also the virant blue of the plumbago at the door...
The apple tree is a pleasing blend of green and gold leaves, the apples themselves as gold as myth against the blue sky.
From the bedroom where I sleep when I visit or housesit for these wonderful friends, I see radiant autumn colors and the bright yellow gift of the December cycle of lemons.
The last of the yellow roses burn in the dusk.
On a walk near sunset last night I came upon the local congress of crows that congregates, skitterish, in various dead oaks, ever debating over place, full of loud purpose.
This morning I heard I single crow above me when I stepped out under the tall pine tree; in a voice like a squeaky wooden screw turning in a wooden screw hole, it called out ag, ag, ag-ag. A crow some distance to the west echoed with precisely the same call: ag, ag, ag-ag. A crow about the same distance, but to the north, called ag ag, ag-ag. They were triangulating the territory. They repeated the same “cawl” in the same directional order for the brief time I listened – marking the borders of a territory, triangular in shape? Calling out the location of the dangerous human? Does anyone know the language of the crow? (I supposedly have a drop of Crow Indian in my DNA, but it doesn't seem to help.)
Lucky, sleeping nearby, moans in his sleep the same as a lonely hman may whimper in his sleep from lack of love, with a sad desire. A letter,ike the time it takes to let the ink flow from a pen, may tap into Now's slow time where small things are noticed, and are worth noticing. The flowers in a room, dropping petals, may seem as important as the cries of crowds caught up in cruel rapid fire somewhere and shown on the daily news, the ongoing tragedy.
Write someone a letter.
This kawing koncatenation in the midst of kalm (how the K sound saws at things) provokes a particular memory -- Why? -- and I will go on now computer, having finished typing the letter I had written by hand -- I guess the computer unleashes a different kind of talk. Dealing with the move after the fire in my old apartment building led to many days or weeks of being intensely present to deal with an endless number of challenges and complications; then, abruptly, I am opening up decades-old storage boxes, from which ghosts fly out, and I am then traveling, by these letters, back fifty years in time. Something about this sudden upheaval, or clash of times, or this dipping suddenly into the calm of the countryside, able to stop and take a breath, along with the daily witnessing of the shallow lives walking through the debris of outdated values where Americans are persuaded to live with this week's new electronic toy, or distract themselves with some other shallow pastime, has led me to a particular memory. I guess because it touched in 1960 on a social illness that has persisted from then until now.
When I was a soldier boy wandering the streets of various cities, in San Francisco a sweet African American man took me in for a day or a day and a night -- I don't remember exactly -- but I won't say "picked me up," although there was sweet lovemaking . No, in fact, he treated me like a fellow human being, with intelligent conversation, and kindness, and so did his mother who welcomed me as if I were not a stranger and made lunch for both of us, in no way resembling the current stereotype of the church-going African American who despises homosexuals. But that was the other San Francisco, the one that used to exist. No-one who living here then (I can almost feel confident that it is a generality with a great deal of truth) was judgemental toward anyone else (well, maybe out where Dan White was growing up). That was before world publicity very thoroughly trampled that San Francisco, left it behind as an earlier geological stratum, and was replaced by this later San Francisco (where the people of that former San Francisco can no longer afford to live! -- It's O.K., I prefer Oakland now).
In that sweet time, the lithe and loving African-American man insisted on sending me off with a valuable gift, It was not in my nature to distrust someone because of the color of the skin, and a good thing for that because I was thereby able to enjoy the company of a loving nature and received a special gift from the man, a gift that seemed rather ironic considering that people associated African-Americans with violence, yet he gave me the key to why violence exists, insisting that I accept it as a gift -- the slim volume of J. Bronowski's THE FACE OF VIOLENCE. J. Bronowski had some strange attitudes in one long television series he made, but this book on the causes of violence should not languish as it has.
In our current world of short messages punched out with one finger, individual thought and feeling has as much value as bird droppings even to those having those thoughts and feelings.
Allow me a brief aside before I return to Bronowski. I was a journalism major my first three semesters in college, which required me at one point to research the history of my hometown paper. Like most small town papers, the Nappanee Advance News was not, in spite of its name, prescient -- able to write the news in "advance" of it happening; in fact, it lacked news almost entirely. It had become little more than ads for sales, with a few brief personal news items. But I found in the library archives that at its beginning in the mid-1800s, the hometown newspaper was a forum for ideas and debate, and the participants in those discussions were intelligent and informed. Through their newspapers, small towns had what Bronowski calls small or local Centers of Recognition by which every individual citizen had a worthwhile and recognized identity, and with the strength of that identity found something to say and tried to make it worth saying because there was a place where someone would hear them say it.
All that was replaced, with a deflation of local identity by Centers of Recognition that became only national or global. Now, the only degree of recognition acknowledged to be of any real value is "celebrity," and hordes are chasing it like whippets at a racetrack chasing the mechanical rabbit.
Bronowski's notion that recognition of each individual, providing them a sense of identity, is a notion that should not be dismissed as too simple or too obvious, but celebratedd for being so simple and obvious -- and yet people appear to still be puzzled by the causes of violence. Nothing hurts an individual soul more than a sense of having no identity (regardless of how the comfortable and secure may have a philosopical regard for the value of a concept of "non-being," or spiritual thinkers treasure the "still center" of "emptiness"). Without awareness of the social need for local centers of recognition, the only recognition is "celebrity" (It is like everyone voting conservative with the delusion that they will one day be rich), so the only way the human of average talent or means can achieve this inflated notion of identity is by killing a celebrity or a well-known person, or, on a smaller scale, killing on a scale that will assure a place in the national news. No matter what else the motivation, the desire to really feel they exist is behind the violence. Along with the names of assassinated people that you had loved and respected, you know the names of their assassins, who have thereby achieved celebrity, or, rather, have stolen a well-known identity that they can wear then as if it were naturally their own.
And how does any gang member, anticipating no life of note beyond adolescence, achieve identity-- through violence. The daily news is easy to understand in the light of Bronowski's observation. To lose your job or be fired or be divorced may cause some individual to feel they have lost their identity, and, clamber insanely to get it back like a drowning man trying to reach the life-saving ring.
That was the key I was shown 50 years ago that I have seen no-one in power or influence to consider how to resolve the ongoing violence experienced by a population that feels invisible and powerless; few, like Conrad's sailors, can see the beauty in a "glorious and obscure fate."
Should I believe that television talent shows and reality TV shows are some effort at democracy -- or still the delusion of "celebrity"? How about the individual centers of recognition that are Internet forums, or blogs and websites? How about the Blue Elephant? Does he exist? Ha! He laughs, content to be a cloud. If you believe in the existence of the man naked inside the diaphanous cloud of his Blue Elephant costume -- avert your eyes! And do nothing but enjoy your own life...I close with this ironic "Merry Kitschmas" -- There is too much of this across the U.S.A. -- How many are willing to call this Beauty?:
And I'm NOT, I'm NOT, I'm NOT afraid of their cat Lucky!
CLICK on the heading above, and you will see that he is NOT Satan...truly...
And I'm Not Afraid of the Ghost in the House....
Or is this the ghost, like a firefly Michael Cheda captured in a jar in the mid-1960s? http://www.flickr.com/photos/8391810@N07/3463724671/
Saturday, December 12, 2009
I Went to a Die-In,
a roaming die-in, with various stations for dying, around the Ferry Building, but I could only die twice before a dizzy spell made me drop out...
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Opera and other Extravagant Treats
Paul Harmon whom we all know to be a generous friend (and to many of us a sometimes employer) went overboard on the last Sunday in November, treating me to the opera.
A box seat to see Verdi's Otello, conducted by our lively new young Italian conductor, Nicola Luisotti, with Johan Botha as Otello,
Zvetelna Vassileva as Desdemona, and Marco Vratogna as Iago.
Then dinner at Zuni Cafe.
A box seat to see Verdi's Otello, conducted by our lively new young Italian conductor, Nicola Luisotti, with Johan Botha as Otello,
Zvetelna Vassileva as Desdemona, and Marco Vratogna as Iago.Then dinner at Zuni Cafe.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Protesting the Unmanned Drone Bombers
Glad that my friend Martha and her Code Pink sisters demonstrated at Creech against the unmanned drone bombers that are killing so many civilians in Afghanistant (leading more angry young men to join the Taliban). It was bad enough when pilots felt the tiny figures they bombed were not human -- now there is not even a human on board to have or deny a human reaction. The Michael Moore website picked up on the demonstration:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latest-news/war-protest-comes-creech
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
"Barbara Lee Speaks for Me"
CLICK ON HEADING ABOVE TO VIEW A SLIDE SHOW OF BARBARA LEE, the ONLY member of the U.S. House of Representatives, who voted against giving Bush the blank check of power that led to the horrors of the war in Iraq. She has proposed a bill to block further support of the war in Afghanistan, and spoke here in front of the Oakland City Hall on 23 November 2009, preceded by someone whose name I missed; then Tom Haydn; then Danny Glover, who introduced Representative Lee. There are more photos of Danny Glover as his native acting ability lead to many gestures.
Oakland Museum Construction Wall
Oakland Museum, undergoing some reconstruction, has this colorful construction wall:
Friends With Great New Websites, or New News
Added to my accompanying list of blogs/websites,
ONE
Be sure to check out the beauty of the work of Gail Horvath at www.gailhorvath.com
TWO
Already in that list, but check Louise Nayer's website again to get news of Louise's book, BURNED, that will be published in April. Let her know if you have ideas on where and how to promote her intense and important book. Read more about it on her websitehttp://www.louisenayer.com/ which has a link to her blog.
THREE
While I have a link for him, when Fred Goldsmith has finished his new website, with his unique photographic vision, that will be added to my accompanying list of blogs.
ONE
Be sure to check out the beauty of the work of Gail Horvath at www.gailhorvath.com
TWO
Already in that list, but check Louise Nayer's website again to get news of Louise's book, BURNED, that will be published in April. Let her know if you have ideas on where and how to promote her intense and important book. Read more about it on her websitehttp://www.louisenayer.com/ which has a link to her blog.
THREE
While I have a link for him, when Fred Goldsmith has finished his new website, with his unique photographic vision, that will be added to my accompanying list of blogs.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Saturday, November 14, 2009
REDISCOVERIES, Part 2
When I lived on Rhode Island Street in San Francisco, I ended up with two cats. The black Burmese whined constantly, which was very annoying, and yet when she died I was more distressed by her death than by the death of my other cat Cirrus. Here is that annoying Sweet Pea Hecate Isis Marie, peeking in.
Cirrus Psylocybin, when I brought out the camera, always began to strike poses, like a Vogue model, and in this case knew that she would reveal how brilliant she was by sitting on the Collected Verses of Wallace Stevens.
Responding to a False News Bulletin in San Francisco
on Saturday Night, October 18, 1980
A cloud of radiation is floating over from China tonight.
The Wise Virgins’ Suite I am playing may be my last tape.
Skipping the fact that tomorrow night I may be puking out
my intestines like a string of sausages, I carry on. Give us
this day our daily death. A stack of quarters rests on zebra’d
wood: the coins belong to empire, but I sanded and stained
and polished the wood on that table and brought out the grain.
My cats purr. Recorded strings reanimate the row of human
arms that sawed them once so gently, while recording.
The cloud of radiation from China – Will it arrive in the shape
of a dragon? A cat rumbles at my shoulder. The one at my side
leaps away, chasing nothing, it seems – no mouse. A moth!
She leaps in the air, a flight of my black cat Sweet Pea Hecate
Isis Marie – or, for daily communication, simply Sweet Pea.
She’s at my foot, enticing me to drag my toe along her spine.
Will I be scratching the cat’s back when the heavens scour
us out? Sweet Pea chases out Cirrus, the cat at my ear:
replaces her mother behind my head, eager to be a pillow
for the dead. Dead cat. Dead cat. Dead killer. Sitting in
my electric chair, will I have crazy cats in my hair? a fur
fire cap? my brains a blaze? A terrible unknowing comes
toward us, cats. It is forgetting us hour by hour, and nothing
of us will be here in the dawn – so let’s trail away
and along the wind – smoke-cats, man-moth blasted.
James McColley Eilers, copyright 2009
MORE THINGS UNEARTHED FROM STORAGE. For its significance, you must know that it is from a period when the San Francisco State Strike of 1968-69 had come to an end. Many were uneasy about ending the strike and returning to work, fearful that Strike demands would not be met. Following the poster is a verse I wrote at the time:
At that time, Beverly Dahlen included this in our AFT #1928 newsletter:
In 1969, Ending the San Francisco State Strike
Anger, tears, and resentment fill the hot, smoky room
where the teachers deliberate: Shall we end the Strike?
In the distance the firecrackers of the Chinese New Year:
a snorting sound. I dream of a great blue dragon
twisting through the empty streets, tearing aside the veils
of rain. It approaches this room, hot with betrayal,
thick with regret, “Whatever may influence our decision – “
With the possibility of violence ever present – Boom!
a firecracker lands outside. Tension breaks into laughter.
Like a room full of frantic mice our Magic Markers
dance and squeak as Local 1928 rectifies its picket
signs, and races back to the picket line. The teachers
return to abandoned classrooms, ponder the future
in deserted offices, and repeat their rosary of intangibles.
Those still out walking the line hope to free themselves
from their elders’ dreaming. Roger Alvarado says that
enough bites from enough fleas can make the dog get up
and move. If now we too must return, break momentum,
we tell ourselves, it is but to loose our frightful mice
on the haunted rooms where ghosts are lecturing ghosts,
and hope we will not become ghosts ourselves: We are
determined to be forever biting the Dog of State.
[Printed, AFT Local 1928 Weekly News, Vol. I, No. 5, Mar. 7, 1969]
Another rediscovery -- the poetry reading at Glide Memorial with an amazing collection of poets, to raise funds for the strike:
Cirrus Psylocybin, when I brought out the camera, always began to strike poses, like a Vogue model, and in this case knew that she would reveal how brilliant she was by sitting on the Collected Verses of Wallace Stevens.
Responding to a False News Bulletin in San Francisco
on Saturday Night, October 18, 1980
A cloud of radiation is floating over from China tonight.
The Wise Virgins’ Suite I am playing may be my last tape.
Skipping the fact that tomorrow night I may be puking out
my intestines like a string of sausages, I carry on. Give us
this day our daily death. A stack of quarters rests on zebra’d
wood: the coins belong to empire, but I sanded and stained
and polished the wood on that table and brought out the grain.
My cats purr. Recorded strings reanimate the row of human
arms that sawed them once so gently, while recording.
The cloud of radiation from China – Will it arrive in the shape
of a dragon? A cat rumbles at my shoulder. The one at my side
leaps away, chasing nothing, it seems – no mouse. A moth!
She leaps in the air, a flight of my black cat Sweet Pea Hecate
Isis Marie – or, for daily communication, simply Sweet Pea.
She’s at my foot, enticing me to drag my toe along her spine.
Will I be scratching the cat’s back when the heavens scour
us out? Sweet Pea chases out Cirrus, the cat at my ear:
replaces her mother behind my head, eager to be a pillow
for the dead. Dead cat. Dead cat. Dead killer. Sitting in
my electric chair, will I have crazy cats in my hair? a fur
fire cap? my brains a blaze? A terrible unknowing comes
toward us, cats. It is forgetting us hour by hour, and nothing
of us will be here in the dawn – so let’s trail away
and along the wind – smoke-cats, man-moth blasted.
James McColley Eilers, copyright 2009
MORE THINGS UNEARTHED FROM STORAGE. For its significance, you must know that it is from a period when the San Francisco State Strike of 1968-69 had come to an end. Many were uneasy about ending the strike and returning to work, fearful that Strike demands would not be met. Following the poster is a verse I wrote at the time:
At that time, Beverly Dahlen included this in our AFT #1928 newsletter:
In 1969, Ending the San Francisco State Strike
Anger, tears, and resentment fill the hot, smoky room
where the teachers deliberate: Shall we end the Strike?
In the distance the firecrackers of the Chinese New Year:
a snorting sound. I dream of a great blue dragon
twisting through the empty streets, tearing aside the veils
of rain. It approaches this room, hot with betrayal,
thick with regret, “Whatever may influence our decision – “
With the possibility of violence ever present – Boom!
a firecracker lands outside. Tension breaks into laughter.
Like a room full of frantic mice our Magic Markers
dance and squeak as Local 1928 rectifies its picket
signs, and races back to the picket line. The teachers
return to abandoned classrooms, ponder the future
in deserted offices, and repeat their rosary of intangibles.
Those still out walking the line hope to free themselves
from their elders’ dreaming. Roger Alvarado says that
enough bites from enough fleas can make the dog get up
and move. If now we too must return, break momentum,
we tell ourselves, it is but to loose our frightful mice
on the haunted rooms where ghosts are lecturing ghosts,
and hope we will not become ghosts ourselves: We are
determined to be forever biting the Dog of State.
[Printed, AFT Local 1928 Weekly News, Vol. I, No. 5, Mar. 7, 1969]
Another rediscovery -- the poetry reading at Glide Memorial with an amazing collection of poets, to raise funds for the strike:
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
THE FIRE
How do you explain to anyone the experience of shipwreck – call it great exaggeration to use that metaphor for the effect of a fire in my old apartment building in an apartment above and one apartment over, leading to smoke and water damage (water sloshing the deck on the sinking ship) that forced me to move. You think first of survival. Find something to cling to and stay afloat.
The surviving parts of my cabin are transferred piece by piece. I am a strong bird constructing a nest from the detritus of my previous nest. In a few weeks my cabin looks much the same as my cabin in the ship that sank. I recreate the illusion of stability that I had before, but now it feels like a preparation for an Egyptian tomb. Death is imminent now, and I have gathered all I will need in my afterlife.
But this is my afterlife, the life after I, whose sole and most urgent longing all my life has been to have a stable habitude where my inner life might thrive, may briefly be free of the constant fear of merely floating on an ever melting ice floe, waiting to be forced into the next dislocation.
The cabin looks a great deal as it looked in the old ship, but inwardly the shipwreck lives on – the broken beams and floorboards, and the sinking into the cold ocean waters. And you know it is just a matter of time, too short a time, when you will be forced to move on, not even into death, just another laborious, mundane Judgement Day, an0ther grim reckoning, while comedians make jokes about how old people “seem to move into smaller and smaller spaces.” We who are growing older are not supposed to mention what it is like.
I feel like the man in Galway Kinnell’s verse “The Man on the Hotel Room Bed”:
“a man lying alone to avoid being abandoned,
who wants to die to escape the meeting with death.”
Meanwhile my numb self looks whole, polished to smoothness like a stone on the shore (that wishes to be that stone that skips merrily on the surface of moving water), and that is better than for anyone to see that inside you are all sticks thrusting out in all directions and wires impossibly entangled. After this time while you still lack the strength for the distraction of the common everyday lies, you will find the old awareness-deadening routine? Or be a changed man?
Of course, I can only write this because I have finally stepped out of packing, moving, unpacking, arranging, and played the idle man, spending an hour in a coffee shop – in my old neighborhood.
I told friends how, during the transition, I awoke one night to find the hose of my apnea C-PAC machine wrapped twice around my neck –
In that twisted time of the move, sleeping first on a mattress on a floor, then, amid debris, in my old bed, I awoke in the middle of the night and wrote,
“The lonely animal awakened again, having slept only briefly, and, using one hand as a grip, slide it down the length of his other arm as if removing an invisible sleeve. He froze there for a moment, his long thin arms hanging away from his bed like the two crossed legs of a sleeping deer.
“What vigil must his body make each night, waking to know-not-what. Wander out of bed – bathroom, kitchen – nothing needed there, but he takes a drink of cold water.
“Soon sleep will cushion him again, take him back into its arms, an invitation to return to some dark place in the foliage, nest of the soul.”
It reminded me of another time when I felt displaced and became a sleepwalker. At about age 8, after returning to my family from the year when they left me with an Italian family, the first clue that I was having a nervous breakdown was when an aunt discovered that I was a sleepwalker. Was I looking for a way to return to my Italian family? They, of course, could not accept my living with them forever while that was precisely what I was looking for, trying to find my way back to the Marantos, although there, too, I would feel displaced, on loan, borrowed. Am I always longing for “the place” (I know I am, but I never know for sure what that is), and never finding it? Is that true for everyone? Does everyone have a sense that anyone’s life is an exile? Maybe this newly reconstructed nest will become, albeit briefly, my “place.”
It feels important to find my “present life” again, but, with this move, even more than previous ones, I am looking through every storage box – This will be a slow process -- and each box releases some number of ghosts, dragging me back into the past to reconcile why I have kept these mementos, like old bones. A couple packets of letters – not many, but saved, clearly, because they were the most intense and meaningful. On my blog, I may have a series of “REDISCOVERIES.”
REDISCOVERIES
I hope I can find (and trust) some historical archive – the Gay Lesbian Historical Society, or the Gay section of the San Francisco Library?) – that would esteem and want to preserve this collage: It is from the first ever showing of the AIDS quilt – at the Moscone Center.
Click on this if you want to see it closer:
I think the photos are arranged well, but, most important, the sad child gives the human touch to the collage. One of the quilts is for someone I knew, Morgan Pinney, who was a one-man Gay Liberation before there was a Gay Liberation. He was a professor at San Francisco State who early on addressed State-wide teachers conferences with the announcement that he was gay. He was also the man who doled out union funds for those who were involved in the San Francsco State Strike of 1969. As with so many gay people, his family’s rejection of him for being a gay man had an embittering effect, but did not keep him from fighting for equal rights. His executor, James Hicks, if he reads this, might want to add more information, but one great irony is that James knew that Morgan would want to respond to gays in Moscow who needed a Xerox machine for their leaflets – at a time when the Russians overturned the old system, and that Xerox machine helped them to spread the word of their new revolution.
I will have to send the Robert Helps Archives at the University of Southern Florida in Tampa a letter that Bob sent when he was granted a residency at the MacDowell Colony so that he could concentrate on composing, away from performing as a concert pianist or teaching half-years at the Boston Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Click on the image of the letter if you want to read it:
Click on this if you want to see it closer:
I think the photos are arranged well, but, most important, the sad child gives the human touch to the collage. One of the quilts is for someone I knew, Morgan Pinney, who was a one-man Gay Liberation before there was a Gay Liberation. He was a professor at San Francisco State who early on addressed State-wide teachers conferences with the announcement that he was gay. He was also the man who doled out union funds for those who were involved in the San Francsco State Strike of 1969. As with so many gay people, his family’s rejection of him for being a gay man had an embittering effect, but did not keep him from fighting for equal rights. His executor, James Hicks, if he reads this, might want to add more information, but one great irony is that James knew that Morgan would want to respond to gays in Moscow who needed a Xerox machine for their leaflets – at a time when the Russians overturned the old system, and that Xerox machine helped them to spread the word of their new revolution.
I will have to send the Robert Helps Archives at the University of Southern Florida in Tampa a letter that Bob sent when he was granted a residency at the MacDowell Colony so that he could concentrate on composing, away from performing as a concert pianist or teaching half-years at the Boston Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Click on the image of the letter if you want to read it:
Monday, August 31, 2009
A Perfect Nugget of Ignorance
In response to the entry (quite a while ago) where I showed the votive candle on which someone had placed Obama's head on the body of St. Martin de Porres (a charming bit of whimsy), I got this comment from Anonymous (Anonymous may not have a sense of whimsy). Wonderful to have such a perfect nugget of ignorance, although I do agree that we should give the country back to the original inhabitants (more about that below).
"From: Anonymous
Date: August 31, 2009 12:36:05 AM PDT
Subject: [The Blue Elephant] New comment on Saint Obama.
"I think that is totally out of hand stupidity! He's more like the anti-christ and is fooling everyone...he's about to turn this nation into Socialist Country and his face is everywhere and didn't do a thing about anything except give his banker friends our money! Give the nation back to the American Indians before the Latinos and Jews destroy it! Long Live the Truth!"
Hey! Anonymous left out gay people! I wonder if the anti-Socialist Anonymous realizes that the original people on the continent assumed that the earth belonged to itself. Those who nearly decimated them felt the earth should be parceled out and owned, and it is ironic that it is they who suffer a sense of rootlessness. As their sense that their portions of the earth were not true places on the earth, real as dirt and grass, but "liquid assets," they too became liquid assets, and thus their mad vision spreads its disconnection from reality (otherwise called "the environment") A mad vision -- Save us, Tecumseh!
"From: Anonymous
Date: August 31, 2009 12:36:05 AM PDT
Subject: [The Blue Elephant] New comment on Saint Obama.
"I think that is totally out of hand stupidity! He's more like the anti-christ and is fooling everyone...he's about to turn this nation into Socialist Country and his face is everywhere and didn't do a thing about anything except give his banker friends our money! Give the nation back to the American Indians before the Latinos and Jews destroy it! Long Live the Truth!"
Hey! Anonymous left out gay people! I wonder if the anti-Socialist Anonymous realizes that the original people on the continent assumed that the earth belonged to itself. Those who nearly decimated them felt the earth should be parceled out and owned, and it is ironic that it is they who suffer a sense of rootlessness. As their sense that their portions of the earth were not true places on the earth, real as dirt and grass, but "liquid assets," they too became liquid assets, and thus their mad vision spreads its disconnection from reality (otherwise called "the environment") A mad vision -- Save us, Tecumseh!
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Event Honoring LGBT Pioneers
CLICK ON HEADING ABOVE to see slide show. At the San Francisco LGBT Center, on Saturday, 22 August, LGBT Seniors were honored. On the slide show you will find a few of those honored and featured: State Senator Mark Leno, State Assembly member Tom Ammiano, Felicia Elizondo, decades-long political leader Howard Wallace, Janaki Tompkins from New Leafe, Lorraine Hunter, Heather Lamborn, and others.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
In Gualala, to escape Xmas
On the way north....
Near the end of December 2000, I checked into Cabin #8 at the Mar Vista Cabins in Gualala, California. I readily believed the owners, Tom and Renata Dorn, that Cabin #8 was their best cabin, standing a bit away from other cabins and near the woods.
Every now and then it is good to follow the Buddha’s example and meditate “under a Bo Tree” until you are certain that you can still live with yourself amicably and peacefully. With every solitary retreat, one is visited by the same spirits that visited Buddha: loneliness and desire and the fear of aging and dying.
For the pangs of loneliness and fantasies of desire that flew around my “Bo Tree” – that is, Cabin #8 – there was the fish-slender Japanese-American youth at the Cove restaurant in Point Arena, like all the waiters, wearing a black T-shirt with a logo on the back, an altered yin-yang – the tip of the white part ending with the peak of a wave, the end of the black part being a tiny surfer.
It was also a writing retreat, but I found time to write in a journal too, where the part about aging flowed from my pen, and gave me some lines that evoked laughter and nods of recognition when they were spoken in my one act play, TURNING:
THOMAS:
Trying to pull on my sox this morning – What are these toenails? I say to myself. I live alone now so I talk to myself that way. Growing strange – hard to pull on sox without getting caught on some odd splinter of a toenail. I’m growing stems now – I’m growing branches – I‘m becoming a tree!
LENNOX:
What’s with this long list of complaints? It goes on and on –
THOMAS:
Well, excuse me, world. It’s just that I am feeling a little worn in places – one eye, one ear – the way any fabric will grow thin in time, and then holes appear. Like old wallpaper, yellowing, drying, but not flaking off the wall – a picture that no-one sees anymore.
No longer troubled by that Xmas phobia in 2009, it is difficult to remember that I was also in that cabin for a few days in Gualala as a means of hiding out from Xmas. What that was all about would require a separate exposition, but now it seems very silly. Among the people I know, Xmas does not exist so I have no need to fear the day, the things that day used to evoke.
I don’t know if they are still there, but Tom and Renata Dorn were politically liberal, friendly toward guests with dogs, and had a watchgoat Buster tethered with a generous length of rope in the yard near their office, the red cabin amid all the yellow cabins. Renata had given personal attention to everything. Was it a little painful to see that Cabin #8 was set up for lovers? Everything in twos, including two champaigne glasses and a sprig of mistletoe over the bedroom door? The embroidered and ribboned window curtains were clearly her handiwork, and she must have placed the book of local women writers, given to her by her mother (as it said in the front of the book), inviting us to share her mother’s gift. Looking out the window one afternoon, I saw that Renata was sitting in a chair under a pine looking toward the sun and Buster the billygoat. Lonely people create cottages, and lonely people stay in them, I mused, inviting too many people into my loneliness, except that the solitude of natural places seems to open space for everyone.
Mid-mornings I would drive to do tai chi on a cliff where three sides looked over white water crashing against cliffs – a space just wide enough to do all the steps without falling off into that beautiful swirl of water where rainbows sometimes lingered before the spray fell back into the sea. I am most in love with the ever-changing beauty of water, the patterns of water close up, or the rucked and sequined sea. And in that place, and before reaching it, the sea was the dominant character. Driving past Valley Ford, I came into a landscape less familiar to me, and I felt the old paradox – You can be in a “quiet” forest and realize that it has its own “traffic noise.”* Nature at that point of the coast was not calming to me, as I saw foam slather around the monumental black teeth of the sea, those rock sentinels compact with millions of years of earth-time. Driving past those ominous dark and ancient ogres, electricity shivered through me.
I loved to cross the road from the cabins, unhook the leather thong that held a gate closed, and stand on cliff’s edge, over a hundred wooden steps down to the beach. The pre-dawn might be purple and red, and you heard the bull of the sea snort and stamp loudly on some mornings. That night, the ocean might still bellow, stomp, tear, and snort – while the stars…were silent.
*Wind in the Pines
Listening to the wind in the pines,
I hear the traffic in distant towns;
the roll of surf; the cheers from
a stadium crowd; the falling away
of the world when it rushes by
a diver or a suicide; the restless
murmur of an audience before
a concert or a play; the faint wail
of a far-off train; the keening
of an antique song: The wind
in the pines sings to me every day
in the voice of the bustling Earth,
with, once in a while, a hush
when it pauses to take a breath.
Near the end of December 2000, I checked into Cabin #8 at the Mar Vista Cabins in Gualala, California. I readily believed the owners, Tom and Renata Dorn, that Cabin #8 was their best cabin, standing a bit away from other cabins and near the woods.
Every now and then it is good to follow the Buddha’s example and meditate “under a Bo Tree” until you are certain that you can still live with yourself amicably and peacefully. With every solitary retreat, one is visited by the same spirits that visited Buddha: loneliness and desire and the fear of aging and dying.
For the pangs of loneliness and fantasies of desire that flew around my “Bo Tree” – that is, Cabin #8 – there was the fish-slender Japanese-American youth at the Cove restaurant in Point Arena, like all the waiters, wearing a black T-shirt with a logo on the back, an altered yin-yang – the tip of the white part ending with the peak of a wave, the end of the black part being a tiny surfer.
It was also a writing retreat, but I found time to write in a journal too, where the part about aging flowed from my pen, and gave me some lines that evoked laughter and nods of recognition when they were spoken in my one act play, TURNING:
THOMAS:
Trying to pull on my sox this morning – What are these toenails? I say to myself. I live alone now so I talk to myself that way. Growing strange – hard to pull on sox without getting caught on some odd splinter of a toenail. I’m growing stems now – I’m growing branches – I‘m becoming a tree!
LENNOX:
What’s with this long list of complaints? It goes on and on –
THOMAS:
Well, excuse me, world. It’s just that I am feeling a little worn in places – one eye, one ear – the way any fabric will grow thin in time, and then holes appear. Like old wallpaper, yellowing, drying, but not flaking off the wall – a picture that no-one sees anymore.
No longer troubled by that Xmas phobia in 2009, it is difficult to remember that I was also in that cabin for a few days in Gualala as a means of hiding out from Xmas. What that was all about would require a separate exposition, but now it seems very silly. Among the people I know, Xmas does not exist so I have no need to fear the day, the things that day used to evoke.
I don’t know if they are still there, but Tom and Renata Dorn were politically liberal, friendly toward guests with dogs, and had a watchgoat Buster tethered with a generous length of rope in the yard near their office, the red cabin amid all the yellow cabins. Renata had given personal attention to everything. Was it a little painful to see that Cabin #8 was set up for lovers? Everything in twos, including two champaigne glasses and a sprig of mistletoe over the bedroom door? The embroidered and ribboned window curtains were clearly her handiwork, and she must have placed the book of local women writers, given to her by her mother (as it said in the front of the book), inviting us to share her mother’s gift. Looking out the window one afternoon, I saw that Renata was sitting in a chair under a pine looking toward the sun and Buster the billygoat. Lonely people create cottages, and lonely people stay in them, I mused, inviting too many people into my loneliness, except that the solitude of natural places seems to open space for everyone.
Mid-mornings I would drive to do tai chi on a cliff where three sides looked over white water crashing against cliffs – a space just wide enough to do all the steps without falling off into that beautiful swirl of water where rainbows sometimes lingered before the spray fell back into the sea. I am most in love with the ever-changing beauty of water, the patterns of water close up, or the rucked and sequined sea. And in that place, and before reaching it, the sea was the dominant character. Driving past Valley Ford, I came into a landscape less familiar to me, and I felt the old paradox – You can be in a “quiet” forest and realize that it has its own “traffic noise.”* Nature at that point of the coast was not calming to me, as I saw foam slather around the monumental black teeth of the sea, those rock sentinels compact with millions of years of earth-time. Driving past those ominous dark and ancient ogres, electricity shivered through me.
I loved to cross the road from the cabins, unhook the leather thong that held a gate closed, and stand on cliff’s edge, over a hundred wooden steps down to the beach. The pre-dawn might be purple and red, and you heard the bull of the sea snort and stamp loudly on some mornings. That night, the ocean might still bellow, stomp, tear, and snort – while the stars…were silent.
*Wind in the Pines
Listening to the wind in the pines,
I hear the traffic in distant towns;
the roll of surf; the cheers from
a stadium crowd; the falling away
of the world when it rushes by
a diver or a suicide; the restless
murmur of an audience before
a concert or a play; the faint wail
of a far-off train; the keening
of an antique song: The wind
in the pines sings to me every day
in the voice of the bustling Earth,
with, once in a while, a hush
when it pauses to take a breath.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Oakland Cathedral, Part Two
Click on the heading above for additional Photos of the new Oakland Cathedral...with an unfortunate climax:
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Turning 72
Sending this virtual tart to those who celebrated my birthday with me:
I am certainly saturated with the loving kindness of my friends after a week-long series of celebrations of my birthday. Don't do it again. You will kill me with kindness. I hesitate to include the names and photos of people I know on the blog, never certain whether they will want that, but there was food, flowers, music, more attention than any one person can endure. Here are some of the results:
And at last I go to sleep under my birthday lei -- Yes, the kind that's spelled l-e-i
I am certainly saturated with the loving kindness of my friends after a week-long series of celebrations of my birthday. Don't do it again. You will kill me with kindness. I hesitate to include the names and photos of people I know on the blog, never certain whether they will want that, but there was food, flowers, music, more attention than any one person can endure. Here are some of the results:
And at last I go to sleep under my birthday lei -- Yes, the kind that's spelled l-e-i
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Code Pink's Monthly Golden Gate Bridge Demonstration
Hurrah for Code Pink (who have the determination and vigor of the Suffragettes). In this photogaphy by Jess, friend Martha Hubert is in the lead!
Karen Emmerich at the Center for the Art of Translation
Click twice on the title above for a slide show of Ms. Emmerich speaking.
On 12 May 2009, friend Martha Hubert and I went to see Karen Emmerich at one of the Center for the Art of Translation's 12:30-1:30 events. She read from her translations of 20th century Greek writers, beginning with selections from I'D LIKE, described as "a collection of thirteen linked stories by Amanda Michalopoulou, in which the characters are brought together by the repetition of seemingly random details: blossoming almond trees, red berets, bleeding feet, and accidents both large and small." Then Ms. Emmerich read selections from translations in process -- a novel by "feminist writer Margarita Karapanou," and "short stories by Ersi Sotiropoulou, a controversial writer whose award-winning novel ZIG-ZAG THROUGH THE BITTER ORANGE TREES was recently removed from school libraries throughout Greece." She is also translating "nine short books by the experimental poet and art critic Eleni Vakalo, work for which she received a 2007 Translation Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts." She has received numerous other awards and teaches Greek and writing at Columbia University. Finally Ms. Emmerich she read from POEMS (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris, for which she was "the first translator to receive a nomination for the National Book Critics' Circle Prize in Poetry." She described Sachtouris as never having recovered from the horrors of World War II so that his poetry has a searing and bloody imagery, reminiscent perhaps of Mayakovsky.
On 12 May 2009, friend Martha Hubert and I went to see Karen Emmerich at one of the Center for the Art of Translation's 12:30-1:30 events. She read from her translations of 20th century Greek writers, beginning with selections from I'D LIKE, described as "a collection of thirteen linked stories by Amanda Michalopoulou, in which the characters are brought together by the repetition of seemingly random details: blossoming almond trees, red berets, bleeding feet, and accidents both large and small." Then Ms. Emmerich read selections from translations in process -- a novel by "feminist writer Margarita Karapanou," and "short stories by Ersi Sotiropoulou, a controversial writer whose award-winning novel ZIG-ZAG THROUGH THE BITTER ORANGE TREES was recently removed from school libraries throughout Greece." She is also translating "nine short books by the experimental poet and art critic Eleni Vakalo, work for which she received a 2007 Translation Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts." She has received numerous other awards and teaches Greek and writing at Columbia University. Finally Ms. Emmerich she read from POEMS (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris, for which she was "the first translator to receive a nomination for the National Book Critics' Circle Prize in Poetry." She described Sachtouris as never having recovered from the horrors of World War II so that his poetry has a searing and bloody imagery, reminiscent perhaps of Mayakovsky.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Fortunate websites
Old friend E.J. in Idaho has advised me of some civilized and useful websites:
Newslink.org
You can connect with newspapers all over the country.
You can check radio stations.
Well, I have not checked it thoroughly yet, but it seems a a great warehouse of news sources
http://www.aldaily.com
Arts and Letters Daily
He also let me know of a good station for endless classical music: Otto's Opera House. 1.FM. I found it under "Classical" on the radio lists on iTunes, but you can also sign up at their website to get a better idea of the variety available there.
Friday, May 08, 2009
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Monday, May 04, 2009
Things That Need to Be Said
1. Make it clear at every opportunity: Both the so-called Pro-Life people and the so-called Pro-Choice people are pro-life people, one for the life of a fetus – a life that is still a notion, someone who does not exist yet, and the other for the life of a grown woman who has a history and is known and loved. Remind anyone who challenges this that both sides are pro-life, while the pro-life side behaves as if the pro-choice people are Satanic killers. There is the other irony that some of the Pro-Life people, besides verbally abusing women, don’t mind being pro-death, killing doctors and bombing clinics. But rather than be drawn into a them-versus-us game, it is sufficient to explain that both sides of the argument are pro-life.
2. Old age is not a disease. Old age is not the same as death. In fact, old age is the ripening and fulfillment of all a person has been for a lifetime.
In fact, old age is the ripening and fulfillment of all a person has been for a lifetime. There are endless advertisements, however, where people with worried faces are watching older relatives and friends as if they were looking for an admission of communist party membership. They are shown almost to have a certain of relief or satisfaction when an elder relative finally develops Alzheimer’s disease. How relieved they are to give their seniors the drug being advertised, and perhaps there is an added pleasure for them that the drug will torture these burdensome elders who go on clinging to life with numerous side effects, such as diaharrea, depression, heart failure. The worried relatives are finally content, having established old age as an illness, meaning that they, the younger, are not marked yet as people who will get sick and die. The youngest family members are also happy to see that the old will no longer get in the way of their youthful obsessions, frankly using the words “old person” as a description for something bothersome, repugnant, no longer fully human. Of course, if the older were not, in their maturity, more compassionate, they might let the younger know the great obstacle the young represent for civilized life. There is a constant outpouring of these commercial dramas, miniature sentimental films, worthy of satire. 
3. Regretting my own time in the military during these decades of empire-driven wars, I must remember to be more understanding of veterans than I am of myself. Buffy Ste.-Marie’s UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, reminding every human in the service that they have made an existential choice to be there, is a message forever suppressed. But when I read the intelligent and sorrowful accounts of veterans who are also excellent poets, I know I need a more tolerant attitude toward them – and myself. There is also the most important fact – that many young men may be able to find no other work where they are except to join the military. That said, let me vent:
I forget the full list of terms used for war trauma over successive wars (“battle fatigue,” “soldier’s heart,” etc.). In World War I, the reality of the trauma was somewhat conveyed in the term “shell shock.” With the Iraq War, in the same way that they would not allow photographs of the coffins of the dead soldiers, it is infuriating that they disguise the effect of war with an abstraction, a series of initials, PTSD. How many translate PTSD each time they hear it into Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Does PTSD convey the weight of human tragedy? No, war must be antiseptic. I think we should all find some other way to translate those initials in some other way, such as the Pissed-Off and Totally Screwed Syndrome.
We are expected to respect the parents who still refuse to believe that the death of their children in Iraq was a sick joke they voted for, still repeating the reasons long proven as lies. We are expected to go along with the young, apolitical men for whom war was living out a fantasy of knights on crusade or the heroes of war movies. And when they come home with the Pissed-Off Totally Screwed Syndrome, and hate themselves for falling out of the war, feeling they are betraying their warrior buddies, or failing to fulfill the fantasy of being a hero, it is terrible that we don’t interrupt the parents who allow their children to see themselves as failures, reinforcing that self-hatred when the true cure would be for everyone to say, “Thank you for getting sick of killing people! I see that you are among the first members of a better human race. We are proud that you have become sickened with torture and killing. F--k manhood – Welcome to your humanity. We have enrolled you in one of our Peace Academies. We will be sending you out to high schools to teach young people the difference between movie comic book violence and the murder of actual human beings. You will teach them that political leaders are in no way their friends; that wars are not games, but the political manipulations of leaders who themselves would never get near a war zone.” How many join up without illusions, but simply because they need work? We really must have a bail-out for the young and desperate, forced into street crime or world crime – not, as in Germany, given the ability to choose an alternative service.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Alice Walker Returns from Gaza
At an Oakland event entitled, "The Siege of Gaza is an Attack on the Common Heart," Alice Walker, author of THE COLOR PURPLE and other books, gave a grim account of the horrendous injuries and devastation resulting from Israel's 22-day bombing and invasion of Gaza. "An old woman sitting in the ruins said to me, 'May God protect you from the Jews.' I answered, 'It's too late. I married one.' You've got to keep it real." Ms. Walker suggested that Israel is "like a big Ponzi scheme" -- so many investing so much for so long in something, expecting esteemed values to result, only to end with the legacy left from "grinding a people into dust."
Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink and Global Exchange, spoke after Ms. Walker. She said that people in Gaza would bring them the shells that had destroyed their houses, the shells all marked "Made in the USA"
Robert Haas, Poet, Translator, U.S. Poet Laureate
At the Center for the Art of Translation on 14 April 2009, poet, translator, and U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997, Robert Haas, who has a sweet and amiable presence, recited some of his translations. Learning Japanese in order to translate haiku, Haas discovered greater details about the haiku form. It is generally known that every haiku refers to a season, but Haas learned a more detailed code; for example, that a reference to plum blossoms suggests the end of winter; cherry blossoms indicate the fullness of spring; etc. -- information is detailed in his book, The Essential Haiku. He recited several of the published haiku with interesting commentary on most of them, or sometimes an ironic pause or a twinkle in his eye was commentary enough. He also recounted the decades-long personal relationship that has facilitated his translations of the work of Czeslaw Milosz.
I intend to write an account of the journey one takes beginning with an original verse in a language other than English and ending with the final version in English. For the artist, and others perhaps, art in the highest sense is in the process of making what ends up as a "piece of art." On the exploration that takes place In the art of translation, you will often find that you have taken the wrong path and have ended in some cul-de-sacs; you must retrace your steps and take a more likely path. In the process of not finding the right way to express the verse in English, you see that forest of that verse from many angles, and some of them are true shadings of the original verse that you would not have discovered without going through the process of translation. Yet you cannot include every shading in the final verse. With the final translation, you have accumulated a personal subtext that contains the multiple layers that cannot be included in the final choices in the final lines. For the translator, the journey of the translation is a three-dimensional structure. The better the verse, the more you are able to walk into it and walk around in it. It can be maddening at first to realize that your true experience of the verse must be truncated, remain a private experience. There is at least one verse where I regret that I did not keep every failed translation of the verse as they record that journey. For that verse, I wished I could make a sculpture of it. I suspect that some of the Mayan stella may reflect that wish – Perhaps after you read each flat surface, you can also read through from one side to the other. If not true of Mayan stella, it is certainly a possibility for some artist.
Tai chi on the pier…
Cormorant drying its wings,
the first position.
I intend to write an account of the journey one takes beginning with an original verse in a language other than English and ending with the final version in English. For the artist, and others perhaps, art in the highest sense is in the process of making what ends up as a "piece of art." On the exploration that takes place In the art of translation, you will often find that you have taken the wrong path and have ended in some cul-de-sacs; you must retrace your steps and take a more likely path. In the process of not finding the right way to express the verse in English, you see that forest of that verse from many angles, and some of them are true shadings of the original verse that you would not have discovered without going through the process of translation. Yet you cannot include every shading in the final verse. With the final translation, you have accumulated a personal subtext that contains the multiple layers that cannot be included in the final choices in the final lines. For the translator, the journey of the translation is a three-dimensional structure. The better the verse, the more you are able to walk into it and walk around in it. It can be maddening at first to realize that your true experience of the verse must be truncated, remain a private experience. There is at least one verse where I regret that I did not keep every failed translation of the verse as they record that journey. For that verse, I wished I could make a sculpture of it. I suspect that some of the Mayan stella may reflect that wish – Perhaps after you read each flat surface, you can also read through from one side to the other. If not true of Mayan stella, it is certainly a possibility for some artist.
Tai chi on the pier…
Cormorant drying its wings,
the first position.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
13 March 2009, Fountain Activity, San Francisco
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Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Poet, Fady Joudah
Friend Martha and I went to the Center for the Art of Translation on 10 March 2009 to hear 2007 Yale Younger Poet, Fady Joudah. He read his translations of Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died in August 2008. ("His lyrical poems of exile and longing speak eloquently for displaced persons everywhere, at once evoking his Palestinian homeland and transcending national borders." The translations of Darwish combined three of his books as THE BUTTERFLY'S BURDEN, published by Copper Canyon Press. Mr. Joudah also read from his own beautiful verses, THE EARTH IN THE ATTIC (Yale University Press).
It may sound decadent to say so, but I have always felt that esthetics and ethics can be said it to be the same thing. It sounds superficial to say that certain political attitudes and actions show "a lack of taste" or "poor taste," but I think it is as true as to speak of "good" and "evil." And isn't a lack of taste that Hannah Arendt is speaking of when she sees in "the banality of evil."
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While he was born in Texas in 1971 to Palestinian refugees, Joudah sanely realizes that he is a step away from the plight of the world's oppressed people. He rejects compliments for his work as a field member of Doctors Without Borders, seeing that work as natural responsibility, common decency, not a particular heroism. What he has seen of terrible human conditions around the earth is implicit in his verses, yet he sanely knows he cannot speak with perfect truth about such things, that he lives a step away from the misery he witnesses in the earth's great mass of displaced persons. His attitude toward words, writing poetry, and translating is equally modest. It was a treat to listen to what he said, with a wonderful grace and intelligence, when he paused to make comments between the verses he read.
It may sound decadent to say so, but I have always felt that esthetics and ethics can be said it to be the same thing. It sounds superficial to say that certain political attitudes and actions show "a lack of taste" or "poor taste," but I think it is as true as to speak of "good" and "evil." And isn't a lack of taste that Hannah Arendt is speaking of when she sees in "the banality of evil."
The usual guidelines for this slide show: After starting the slide show, hit the lower right hand frame of arrows going in all directions to make the slides fill the screen. When you want to escape the slide show, push your ESCape key.
While he was born in Texas in 1971 to Palestinian refugees, Joudah sanely realizes that he is a step away from the plight of the world's oppressed people. He rejects compliments for his work as a field member of Doctors Without Borders, seeing that work as natural responsibility, common decency, not a particular heroism. What he has seen of terrible human conditions around the earth is implicit in his verses, yet he sanely knows he cannot speak with perfect truth about such things, that he lives a step away from the misery he witnesses in the earth's great mass of displaced persons. His attitude toward words, writing poetry, and translating is equally modest. It was a treat to listen to what he said, with a wonderful grace and intelligence, when he paused to make comments between the verses he read.
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Swan
We have a solitary swan on Lake Merritt (Merritt Estuary) at the moment:
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The Way (yin and yang = tao)
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Thursday, February 19, 2009
Saint Obama
"St. Obama Candles Spark Priest's Ire," reports John P. Connolly, of The Bulletin, a Roman Catholic publication, 18 February 2009 -- referring to events in Noe Valley, San Francisco:
"A San Francisco priest has called on his parish to boycott a local shop that has decided to sell devotional candles to 'Saint Obama.' The candles, which sell for $15 apiece at a local shop called 'Just For Fun,' were originally devotional candles to honor St. Martin de Porres, widely considered the first black Roman Catholic saint in the Americas. President Barack Obama’s face has been pasted over the head of St. Martin, making it appear that Mr. Obama is the object of veneration. Fr. Tony La Torre of St. Philip the Apostle Church, is calling for a boycott of the store.
“ 'I am appalled that in such a family-oriented neighborhood, any retailer would be so bigoted and so hateful [as] to carry such merchandise just to "make a buck",' Rev. La Torre declared recently in his parish newsletter."
The Good News: While the "store owners Robert Ramsey and David Eiland say they’ve sold more than 700 candles since putting them on display over the Christmas holiday," sales have really exploded because of the disapproval of the Catholic church. I am waiting for one celebrating Saint Harpo Marx.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Walt Whitman Faces Financial Depression
In the U.S. financial depression of 1873, Walt Whitman wrote, "Wandering at Morn":
Wandering at morn,
Emerging from the night from gloomy thoughts, thee in my thoughts,
Yearning for thee harmonious Union! thee, singing bird divine!
Thee coil'd in evil times my country, with craft and black dismay,
with every meanness, treason thrust upon thee,
This common marvel I beheld -- the parent thrush I watch'd
feeding its young,
The singing thrush whose tones of joy and faith ecstatic,
Fail not to certify and cheer my soul.
There ponder'd, felt I,
If worms, snakes, loathsome grubs, may to sweet spiritual songs be turn'd,
If vermin so transposed, so used and bless'd may be,
Then may I trust in you, your fortunes, days, my country;
Who knows but these may be the lessons fit for you?
From these your future song may rise with joyous trills,
Destin'd to fill the world.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
A Fellow Hoosier Turns 200
Abraham wrote one verse, when he visited the terrible landscape of early childhood in Indiana:
The very spot where grew the bread
That formed my bones, I see.
How strange, old field, on thee to tread,
And feel I’m part of thee!
Lincoln recorded this nightmare:
“About ten days ago I retired very late. I had been up, waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into slumber for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible.
“I went from room to room: no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards, and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon this corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. Who is dead in the White House? I demanded of one of the soldiers. The President, was his answer; he was killed by an assassin! Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and though it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.”
"There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” (Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, 27 January 1838)
" Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today." (Notes for a Law Lecture, 1 July 1850)
“The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities. ” (1 July 1854)
“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” (ca. 1 August 1858)
"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed." (Lincoln-Douglas Debate at Ottawa, 21 August 1858)
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” (Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861)
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." (Lincoln’s First Annual Message to Congress, 3 December 1861)
"In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just - a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.” … "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. (Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress, 1 December 1861 or 1862)
“In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and eternity. (1 December 1862)
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.” (Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865)
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” (Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, 19 November 1863)
"Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” (Speech to One Hundred Fortieth Regiment, 17 March 1865)
"Perhaps a man's character is like a tree, and his reputation like its shadow; the shadow is what we think of it, the tree is the real thing."
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people, some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
“Improvement in condition is the order of things in a society of equals.”
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Happy 200th Birthday, Uncle Abe
FATHER ABRAHAM ON ALCATRAZ
I would like my Lincoln-On-Alcatraz to look even more elongated than the actual Abraham Lincoln, stretched out of history into myth and fairy tale, impossibly tall.
I would like the skin of this monumental statue to be metal, perforated with large openings so that people ascending or descending internal stairways may look in all directions at the surrounding landscape, city, ocean, bay, bridges, etc.
Two elevators in the center would stop at various landings, with winding stairs throughout the statue connecting the landings. Some people will challenge themselves to climb or descend all the stairs. Most of the interior would be empty space, with nothing on the various landings, unless some food vendors. The ocean wind and fog would blow through the statue.
This Lincoln would require an excellent sculptor to take the stiffness out of the figure I have drawn, or to exaggerate it even more. It would require great engineers: Alcatraz is called The Rock, but is the rock deep and strong enough to anchor such a tall statue? able to withstand the strong winds there?
My Lincoln should not face San Francisco precisely, nor face the Golden Gate Bridge directly, but face in a direction a little south of the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge.
All right, my fantasy is absurd, and the notion of having a Peace Center on Alcatraz may sound more attractive, but the absurdity is intentional. I want a droll representation of Lincoln -- We've had enough of the historical Lincoln, which is already turning to myth -- So let him be a fantastical creature, a gateway to the imagination, a stick figure Wizard of Oz...
The Lincoln stovepipe hat, of course, must have terraces on the brim and at the top of the hat; an inner observation room when the weather is too fierce; a cafe or restaurant; restrooms; etc.:
I would like my Lincoln-On-Alcatraz to look even more elongated than the actual Abraham Lincoln, stretched out of history into myth and fairy tale, impossibly tall.
I would like the skin of this monumental statue to be metal, perforated with large openings so that people ascending or descending internal stairways may look in all directions at the surrounding landscape, city, ocean, bay, bridges, etc.
Two elevators in the center would stop at various landings, with winding stairs throughout the statue connecting the landings. Some people will challenge themselves to climb or descend all the stairs. Most of the interior would be empty space, with nothing on the various landings, unless some food vendors. The ocean wind and fog would blow through the statue.
This Lincoln would require an excellent sculptor to take the stiffness out of the figure I have drawn, or to exaggerate it even more. It would require great engineers: Alcatraz is called The Rock, but is the rock deep and strong enough to anchor such a tall statue? able to withstand the strong winds there?
My Lincoln should not face San Francisco precisely, nor face the Golden Gate Bridge directly, but face in a direction a little south of the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge.
All right, my fantasy is absurd, and the notion of having a Peace Center on Alcatraz may sound more attractive, but the absurdity is intentional. I want a droll representation of Lincoln -- We've had enough of the historical Lincoln, which is already turning to myth -- So let him be a fantastical creature, a gateway to the imagination, a stick figure Wizard of Oz...
The Lincoln stovepipe hat, of course, must have terraces on the brim and at the top of the hat; an inner observation room when the weather is too fierce; a cafe or restaurant; restrooms; etc.:
Monday, February 02, 2009
Afghanistan Actions
The 30 January 2009 Bill Moyers Journal had a good observation on U.S. plans for Afghanistan. If you have time to read the transcript...
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01302009/transcript3.html
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01302009/transcript3.html
Sunday, February 01, 2009
The Bryan Harrison Band, with Elisa Welch
The Bryan Harrison Band at Jack London Square: Elisa Welch, Bryan Harrison, Dave Coan (playing djembe), Jim McLaren.
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