(courtyard piece)
where light chimes at the strike of each hour
where sharpness shifts into stillness
where crescent moon burns into view
where night-blown cactus breaks into bloom
where an overheated pup enters the stream of infinity pool
where atoms of dissolving ice cascade across a warm windshield
where visitors top out void & refill foramen under shelter of steel
where intervals of space & light draw sudden apertures of awning
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
What else is new in 2010:
Kort is reopening Longevity Acupuncture at the Austin Longevity Center in South Austin. He'll practice on Wednesdays and Fridays beginning on January 6. Congrats, bunny!
Kort is reopening Longevity Acupuncture at the Austin Longevity Center in South Austin. He'll practice on Wednesdays and Fridays beginning on January 6. Congrats, bunny!
These were my resolutions last year. They were more like aspirations then resolutions, I suppose - though I did learn to cook 10 new recipes, finish school, went back to Port Townsend, and a few other items on the list. And some of last year's aspirations will reach fruition this year (i.e. revisiting Colorado and publishing Adamantine).
But for this year, here are renewed aspirations:
- cook more
- run more
- revisit Seattle
- be passionate about my work
- pay off debt
- write more
- keep in touch better
- think big
- more yoga
But for this year, here are renewed aspirations:
- cook more
- run more
- revisit Seattle
- be passionate about my work
- pay off debt
- write more
- keep in touch better
- think big
- more yoga
Monday, December 28, 2009
I went to see my parents in Riverside for a few days and we spent an afternoon at the Palm Springs Art Museum out in the desert. Steve Nash, who ran the Nasher Center in Dallas, has taken over as the Director in Palm Springs. On display was an exhibition of gifts and promised works from the collection of Donna and Cargill "Mac" MacMillan, Jr. The MacMillans played a big role in wooing Nash away from Dallas and their gift to the Palm Springs Art Museum effectively transforms the Museum from a western/regional collection to an exciting collection of cutting-edge contemporary art. Their collection include the work of Nam June Paik, Yoshitomo Nara, Anselm Kiefer, Louise Bourgeois, and other major international art stars. Elsewhere in the galleries was an exhibition of glasswork including a solo show by an Italian artist who'd spent a lot of his time making work in Tacoma, where I took my parents this summer.
My parents do not love contemporary art so I planned a trip with Zeitgist Spam to check out the LA MOCA, which I hadn't been to see in probably 20 years. Here is one of my favorite installations at the MOCA - a room wallpapered in sheets of paper dipped in chocolate by Ed Ruscha. Needless to say, the room is fragrant and sweet-smelling.
I was delighted to find that the MOCA has several of the early works of artist Robert Irwin - his early line painting, one from his dots period, and his transition into sculptural work with light and space. All of these works are covered in Seeing is the Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and reflect the young Irwin's growth and thought process.
The Geffen site was less interesting to me - ideal for large-scale installations and video work, but a lot of what I think of as ugly, grotesque, and poorly fabricated work by artists like Thomas Hirschorn and Paul McCarthy. But the walk down to the Geffen site if you go down First Street takes you thru Little Tokyo which is a wonderful walk thru history.
Outside several storefronts, the history of each business is chronologically cataloged.
And one gets the sense walking down the sidewalk and reading bronze quotes embossed into the sidewalk that oral history interviews with former residents were used to interpret the neighborhood.
This quote read something like "Every day they would deliver the Rampo Shimbun [newspaper].. and each evening my father would check the obituaries."
There was another powerful quote about kids playing on First Street and every family knowing one another. You wouldn't want to let your kids play today on First Street.
From MOCA, John and I went to pick up his wife Kathy and we drove over to the Claremont-McKenna Colleges campus to view the James Turrell installation which was built in 2007.
It is an uttlerly unique skyspace in that it is not an enclosed room or space, but an open courtyard with cutaways of the sky that surround the viewing space. The open nature of the installation invites people into it - while we were there children and families came by to sit on the benches, a pair of girls walking their dogs - the dogs drinking out of the infinity fountain. There are two viewing times for "Dividing the Light" - sunrise and sunset. We made the sunset show.
And stayed for about 45 minutes, watching the changing hues.
There was a tiny slice of new moon that filled the oculus/aperture and it was a perfect night for a skyviewing.
My parents do not love contemporary art so I planned a trip with Zeitgist Spam to check out the LA MOCA, which I hadn't been to see in probably 20 years. Here is one of my favorite installations at the MOCA - a room wallpapered in sheets of paper dipped in chocolate by Ed Ruscha. Needless to say, the room is fragrant and sweet-smelling.
I was delighted to find that the MOCA has several of the early works of artist Robert Irwin - his early line painting, one from his dots period, and his transition into sculptural work with light and space. All of these works are covered in Seeing is the Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and reflect the young Irwin's growth and thought process.
The Geffen site was less interesting to me - ideal for large-scale installations and video work, but a lot of what I think of as ugly, grotesque, and poorly fabricated work by artists like Thomas Hirschorn and Paul McCarthy. But the walk down to the Geffen site if you go down First Street takes you thru Little Tokyo which is a wonderful walk thru history.
Outside several storefronts, the history of each business is chronologically cataloged.
And one gets the sense walking down the sidewalk and reading bronze quotes embossed into the sidewalk that oral history interviews with former residents were used to interpret the neighborhood.
This quote read something like "Every day they would deliver the Rampo Shimbun [newspaper].. and each evening my father would check the obituaries."
There was another powerful quote about kids playing on First Street and every family knowing one another. You wouldn't want to let your kids play today on First Street.
From MOCA, John and I went to pick up his wife Kathy and we drove over to the Claremont-McKenna Colleges campus to view the James Turrell installation which was built in 2007.
It is an uttlerly unique skyspace in that it is not an enclosed room or space, but an open courtyard with cutaways of the sky that surround the viewing space. The open nature of the installation invites people into it - while we were there children and families came by to sit on the benches, a pair of girls walking their dogs - the dogs drinking out of the infinity fountain. There are two viewing times for "Dividing the Light" - sunrise and sunset. We made the sunset show.
And stayed for about 45 minutes, watching the changing hues.
There was a tiny slice of new moon that filled the oculus/aperture and it was a perfect night for a skyviewing.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Happy Festivus.
Forthcoming posts on going home, catching up with Asian American friends, the retrospective show at L.A. MOCA, the Geffen extension space, Little Tokyo, and visiting the Pomona College skypspace with Zeitgist Spam, and various assorted thoughts and pictures now that I am on winter break thru Jan. 4. Also hoping to finish a review of Sherwin Bitsui's wonderful book Flood Song for an upcoming issue of Southwestern American Literature.
Currently, baking cookies, making rum balls and preparing for a white Xmas in Tex.
The new "Bamiyan" broadside printed by Sara Parkel has just arrived hot off the presses. Letterpressed using a photo-polymer plate at the University of Alabama.
Cinematheque Press is making progress on the production of structure of the inner ear and hope to see that tome out by April/AWP.
I can't believe it will be 2010 soon - the start of a new decade. Somehow this feels more monumental to me then a typical changeover in years.
Forthcoming posts on going home, catching up with Asian American friends, the retrospective show at L.A. MOCA, the Geffen extension space, Little Tokyo, and visiting the Pomona College skypspace with Zeitgist Spam, and various assorted thoughts and pictures now that I am on winter break thru Jan. 4. Also hoping to finish a review of Sherwin Bitsui's wonderful book Flood Song for an upcoming issue of Southwestern American Literature.
Currently, baking cookies, making rum balls and preparing for a white Xmas in Tex.
The new "Bamiyan" broadside printed by Sara Parkel has just arrived hot off the presses. Letterpressed using a photo-polymer plate at the University of Alabama.
Cinematheque Press is making progress on the production of structure of the inner ear and hope to see that tome out by April/AWP.
I can't believe it will be 2010 soon - the start of a new decade. Somehow this feels more monumental to me then a typical changeover in years.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
The Book of What Remains by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2010. 126 pp. $16.00 paperback.
The Book of What Remains is the fifth volume of poetry by El Paso-based writer and artist Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Best known for his work as an accomplished author of young adult books and novels, Sáenz returns to his redoubtable roots as an inimitable poet in his latest collection. In The Book of What Remains, Sáenz, a former Catholic priest, explores the aftermath of both private and public tragedies, border violence, and the casualties of war, to consider the Christian apostle Saint Paul’s dictum on what remains, namely faith, hope, and love. (115)
Sáenz divides his book into three major sections. Long narrative poems are intercut with a series of eighteen meditations on living in the desert, inserted throughout the first and third sections of the collection. The poet characterizes the harsh and unforgiving qualities of the desert: “your dreams will not save you from the sun” (18), but also points to the ways in which “human history is even crueler than the desert” (184), in recording the history of nuclear testing in Alamogordo, New Mexico. These short contemplative poems illuminate the disharmonious relationship between mankind and the land; Meditation No. 2 satirizes a poetic speaker who endlessly consumes natural resources. His lack of concern for the future of the land culminates with a tongue-in-cheek statement “When all the trees have disappeared, we can all read Robert Frost poems / and feel sad.” (8) There are no traces of “Imperialist Nostalgia” in Sáenz’s poems, which are intense political reflections on a personal ecopoetics rooted firmly in the life and culture of the border experience.
Tragedy, simultaneously pedestrian and life altering, is a major theme throughout Sáenz’s collection. “The
Comforts of the Neighborhood” tells the tale of nineteen-year-old Juan Patricio Peraza, an unarmed and undocumented migrant worker that is mercilessly gunned down by Border Patrol agents in the poet’s hometown. Elsewhere, the poet writes of the breakdown of a marriage that results in the loss of his home and a beloved pet in the divorce settlement. But it is the capacity for deep feeling that bestows truth and beauty upon the poet and gives him the gift of song throughout The Book of What Remains.
At the heart of Sáenz’s collection are the long poems “The Ruined Cities of My Broken, Broken Heart” and “What I Have to Sing About.” In “The Ruined Cities…” the poet addresses himself:
You have been wandering
in the desert for forty years
searching for water
and a politics
and a theology
and a city you call home (55)
Seeking reconciliation in a life filled with ruin, the poet only arrives in “What I Have to Sing About” at the truth that “the road to happiness is a long fucking road trip” (108). There is no performative lament that encumbers Sáenz’s poetic searching, only a gesture towards the transfigurative act of redefining one’s own terms. Through a belief in certainty, goodness, and compassion, the poet arrives at an emancipatory poetics that rejects the “logic of slavery” (5) to realize the poignant epigram that opens the third section of The Book of What Remains: “You are what you remember.” (67)
The Book of What Remains is the fifth volume of poetry by El Paso-based writer and artist Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Best known for his work as an accomplished author of young adult books and novels, Sáenz returns to his redoubtable roots as an inimitable poet in his latest collection. In The Book of What Remains, Sáenz, a former Catholic priest, explores the aftermath of both private and public tragedies, border violence, and the casualties of war, to consider the Christian apostle Saint Paul’s dictum on what remains, namely faith, hope, and love. (115)
Sáenz divides his book into three major sections. Long narrative poems are intercut with a series of eighteen meditations on living in the desert, inserted throughout the first and third sections of the collection. The poet characterizes the harsh and unforgiving qualities of the desert: “your dreams will not save you from the sun” (18), but also points to the ways in which “human history is even crueler than the desert” (184), in recording the history of nuclear testing in Alamogordo, New Mexico. These short contemplative poems illuminate the disharmonious relationship between mankind and the land; Meditation No. 2 satirizes a poetic speaker who endlessly consumes natural resources. His lack of concern for the future of the land culminates with a tongue-in-cheek statement “When all the trees have disappeared, we can all read Robert Frost poems / and feel sad.” (8) There are no traces of “Imperialist Nostalgia” in Sáenz’s poems, which are intense political reflections on a personal ecopoetics rooted firmly in the life and culture of the border experience.
Tragedy, simultaneously pedestrian and life altering, is a major theme throughout Sáenz’s collection. “The
Comforts of the Neighborhood” tells the tale of nineteen-year-old Juan Patricio Peraza, an unarmed and undocumented migrant worker that is mercilessly gunned down by Border Patrol agents in the poet’s hometown. Elsewhere, the poet writes of the breakdown of a marriage that results in the loss of his home and a beloved pet in the divorce settlement. But it is the capacity for deep feeling that bestows truth and beauty upon the poet and gives him the gift of song throughout The Book of What Remains.
At the heart of Sáenz’s collection are the long poems “The Ruined Cities of My Broken, Broken Heart” and “What I Have to Sing About.” In “The Ruined Cities…” the poet addresses himself:
You have been wandering
in the desert for forty years
searching for water
and a politics
and a theology
and a city you call home (55)
Seeking reconciliation in a life filled with ruin, the poet only arrives in “What I Have to Sing About” at the truth that “the road to happiness is a long fucking road trip” (108). There is no performative lament that encumbers Sáenz’s poetic searching, only a gesture towards the transfigurative act of redefining one’s own terms. Through a belief in certainty, goodness, and compassion, the poet arrives at an emancipatory poetics that rejects the “logic of slavery” (5) to realize the poignant epigram that opens the third section of The Book of What Remains: “You are what you remember.” (67)
Monday, December 14, 2009
Ground-breaking took place today for the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.
The new issue of Art in America has a great article on Wolfgang Laib's recent art-making activities, including a write-up by the curator (who organized Laib's last retrospective) on Laib's recent project to bring brahmins to the Mertz Foundation in Italy to stage authentic Vedic fire-making ceremonies as part of his art-making ritual.
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Walking to work this morning and looking at all the new leaf piles, I thought about the trees in my neighborhood and began thinking again of the art book project of Gaylord Schanilec and began to wonder if anyone has yet created a children's book/abecadarian devoted to trees - A is for alder, B is for birch...L is for Linden and P is for Ponderosa. And I am thinking of ponderosas in general because I just discovered from reading about DH Lawrence in Mexico that the famous Lawrence Tree immortalized by O'Keefe is in fact a ponderosa pine. I can imagine an abecadarian book that would be both aesthetic and educational for both adults and children. Trees also come to mind because living in Texas everyone here is all about the BBQ and how you smoke your meat with what wood and such - you would think it is like drinking wine or sake or the like, but not to me!
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Spiegelman on Writing
"Don Marquis once observed that writing a book of poetry and waiting for the reviews is like throwing rose petals into the Grand Canyon and then listening for the echo."
"You must always write fan letters, especially to poets, because they have no chance of making money, and more important, they have no idea whether anyone in the world is reading and responding to their work. Your letter will be like a lifeline."
"You must always write fan letters, especially to poets, because they have no chance of making money, and more important, they have no idea whether anyone in the world is reading and responding to their work. Your letter will be like a lifeline."
I am finishing up reading Willard Spiegelman's Seven Pleasures. I have known Spiegelman in the capacity of a bow-tied academic, the editor of Southwest Review based out of SMU. The times that I have encountered him in public, he has usually been rocking a seersucker or tweed suit with a distinctly E. Coast flavor in contrast to Dallas fashion. He is a snappy dresser and a professorial type who reminds me of my favorite lit professor at BU - Charles Rzepka - also a specialist in Romantic poetry - Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, and Byron. Seven Pleasures is a terrific book of essays, reminiscent of Montaigne's elevated art of nonfiction. Spiegelman is unapologetically academic and himself in these essays - shuttling from one scholarly conference to another, hanging out in London and Italy, taking a retreat at Bogliasco - but he pulls in pop culture/contemporary references from primetime dance shows to the relationship between Richard Long's art and walking to poor urban planning in Dallas, Texas. The limberness of his mind and his ability to trace a literary and aesthetic geneology go beyond exercise, to revealing and reflecting something of how the author perceives and experiences the world. Spiegelman even starts out his wonderful essay on swimming with an exploration of Byron's famous poem on crossing the Hellespont and contracting 'ague. While all of essays in this book are meditations upon activities that bring pleasure, I think the strongest pieces in the book are the ones that explore extremely physical activities such as dancing and swimming - they are not extreme sport experiences, but the experience of physicality for an individual who lives mostly in the world of the visual and auditory senses and the intellect. In this way, they balance and round out a strong and cohesive, slightly biographical, and certainly insightful collection on discovering and experiencing joyfulness.
Daily Candy just repped these products. I love the idea of a necktie or scarf woven out of recycled magnetic cassette tape - I wonder if these designers would take old mixed tapes with sentimental value and use them to fabricate a special commission or order. I like that there scarf is woven of tape that recorded ambient noise and collaged audio in NYC. They claim that if you run the audible fabric up against a tape head that you can actually hear the sound.
Monday, December 07, 2009
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Forthcoming from Filter Press
This is a broadside with two poems on the Bamiyan Buddhas - one by my dear friend Rick Benjamin, and one by me.
Leave me a message in the comments field if you would like one of these.
I ordered this book for the Wittliff Collections, after discovering the work of Anita Brenner this fall - author of Idols Behind Altars, an art historical/anthropological text published in 1929 that commissioned Edward Weston to make photo illustrations to accompany the project. Marie Brenner is Anita Brenner's niece and a journalist for publications like Vanity Fair. She touches upon her family history in San Antonio and Mexico in Apples & Oranges, but the memoir is really a recollection and partial homage to Marie's brother, Carl Brenner.
Brenner explores her relationship with her sibling jumping across time, place, and memory; the book is disjunctive, out of sequence - composed of correspondence, emails, and memories of conversations; the reader comes away with little sense of who Carl is as a fully fleshed person. But Brenner admits that she struggles to see her brother in the light that his girlfriends and community do - that to her, he presents rage and guardedness which goes back to their childhood together.
We get a sense of Brenner's writing and research process - the endless questions and audio recordings, the archival research. Her struggle to find generosity and calm through her yoga practice, which are dropped into the narrative at trying moments and seem empty - a grasping at loose straws. The most interesting parts of the narrative are Brenner's attempts to understand Carl's work as an apple grower in Eastern Washington - a career that he picked up after leaving a successful law practice. Brenner's desperate efforts to come to terms with Carl's cancer and failing health also compel - the grief and helplessness with which she is faced when her brother commits suicide rather than die a slow death from cancer.
Recent Reading
Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese is a brilliant narrative of the Asian American experience which skillfully integrates myth into the author's storytelling style to reflect upon the experience difference. Instead of beginning with Jin Wang's story - the young male protagonist who struggles with fitting in, Yang starts his book with the story of the monkey king who is rejected at a gathering given by the other gods, because he is monkey. Filled with self-loathing and pain, the monkey king puts on a pair of shoes, masters intellectual and physical powers that defeat the most intimidating of enemies, and arms himself with the tools that will protect him from never being hurt again. He even makes his monkey disciples wear shoes.
Like the monkey king, Jin Wang experiences deep shame and alienation for being marked as different. He works hard to fit in - shunning at first the only other Chinese child, Wei-Chen, who suddenly enrolls at his school. Jin perms his hair to fit in, falls in love with a cute Caucasian girl... while the two narratives of Jin Wang and the monkey king seem like separate metaphors for one another - Yang beautifully weaves together the two strands by fully bringing the monkey king into Jin's narrative by exploring the character of Wei-Chen, who is the monkey king's son who has been sent to earth as a test of virtue.
After living on earth, being befriended by Jin, lying to Jin's mother to provide Jin with an alibi to go out with a white girl, and subsequently being rejected by Jin, Wei-Chen foresakes the path of virtue and his true identity and estranges himself from his former identity and family. As Jin's character comes to accept who he is and reconciles his identity with being Chinese American, the boy seeks out reconciliation with his former friend Wei-Chen, bringing transformation and healing to their relationship through the ability to see each other for who they truly are as individuals beyond their physical traits.
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
My university is retrofitting several elliptical workout machines to harness and generate electricity to power the facilities. If exercisers are being used as laborers, I think they should be compensated by having their membership fees waived!
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