tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89166414620431669552024-02-18T22:26:48.326-08:00writing that is not writingIsaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.comBlogger245125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-90953357023206957232018-04-13T08:40:00.004-07:002018-04-13T10:37:18.782-07:00It connects me back<span style="font-size: large;">Someone at <a href="https://www.artsy.net/">artsy</a> found my old Escher tags and asked that I link them as a <a href="https://www.artsy.net/artist/maurits-cornelis-escher">resource</a>. I take this as an exercise, a chance to return to writing here and revisit ancient posts.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Escher exacts a paradox, which is that things change and stay the same. Escher shows how something can be both precise and bizarre, logical and impossible.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Looking back at my posts from seven years ago, I see a version of me who felt lost, trapped. I am wowed by the wordplay and amused at the naivete. I've grown up some since then, but at the same time, I have failed to live up to the intelligence of my immediate post-college searches.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I was trying back then. I lacked hope, but I yearned. Though my situation distressed me, I used my ordered words to transcend my plane.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I was cycling through the same steps. I doubted my powers of flight.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">My past self would have resented this nostalgia, this romanticizing of a dismal time, but I am grateful for the record of who I was several tessellations ago.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">If we have consolation it is not solely in advancement but in continuity.</span>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-18375069404212403462016-01-19T08:12:00.000-08:002016-01-19T08:12:39.997-08:00Rapid Eyes<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
My ex-girlfriend said I had a cold heart but a warm brain. The blood going to the wrong place. I always missed what was important, she said, with redness swelling in her cheeks in a similar misdirection of flow.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
I imagine she intended this to hurt me. As a private investigator, my job requires that I notice significant details.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
My latest case is a bit unusual. There’s this woman who won’t wake up, and her father is paying me to sit at her bedside. I told him, you don’t need a private investigator, you want a doctor, maybe even a priest, but he’d already consulted countless specialists, clergymen, etc., none of whom had any answers. Or maybe they had answers to spare, and yet somehow his daughter had not awoken. He preferred me, he said, because I didn’t pin my salary to promises about her wellbeing. I just got paid to watch.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
She sleeps, and I watch.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
When you’re tracking a missing person, one routine should be to wait around their known hangouts in the hopes that they show up. Only in this case, I’m looking at her body. Her last known sighting. A recently vacated building. But she might come back. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
I’m an insomniac, which is perfect for what’s required on a stakeout—a state of mild alertness. Everything passing through you. A man walking a dog, a trio of women, an empty street corner. All equal. Let it pass through you. Like an argument with your girlfriend. She’s shouting in your face, things like “autistic,” “emotionally garbled,” and the words float, forming in a cluster behind you.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
I’m just taking in information. In this line of work, it’s very important not to be judgmental, but at the same time, it’s important not to get overwhelmed. Typically, as a PI, it helps me if I can work from behind a screen. A pair of binoculars. The windows of a car. A camera lens. Or the scrim that separates the awake from the asleep. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
Waiting for so long in a place that is so familiar to someone else but alien to you, you start to forget who you are. It seems strange that you could find someone as you were losing yourself. Maybe they need you to be the conduit to return to reality. As a PI, it is my job to be that conduit.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
I could be upset. I could be bored. I could be sleeping. But you focus on the reality in front of you. Like when you’re dreaming—you accept everything. You wander through, so to speak, and only later do you think: how strange.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
How strange, in the way that an elevator, carrying my ex-girlfriend upwards, could have been level, even for an instant, with an elevator on the opposite vertical course.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
Like one set of eyelids lowering as another set ascends—in as deep a closure as a coma or as brief a relay as a blink.</div>
Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-41956151970923593462015-11-28T07:35:00.000-08:002015-11-28T07:36:14.318-08:00notes without a center<span style="font-size: large;">I try very hard not to write.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I used to think making art was supposed to make me feel better, but now I think it's to make others feel worse. To unbalance them, to bring them to my level.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I am become weird, disturber of worlds" </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Comedy, ideally, is a way to tell the truth without getting shot.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Add up enough pointless things and you get something that has a point.</span>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-9239922859193555372014-11-07T21:15:00.000-08:002014-11-07T21:18:19.463-08:00a tautology in stringit is what it is<br />
and it's not when it's not<br />
when it knots into knots<br />
it knows not what it is<br />
<br />
it is what it is and it's not when it's not when it knots into knots it knows not what it is<br />
<br />
it knows not what it is<br />
when it knots into knots<br />
and it's not when it's not<br />
it is what it is<br />
<br />
it strings what it strings<br />
its knots<br />
taut<br />
<br />
knows knots<br />
<br />
it's not<br />
knowing<br />
no<br />
what<br />
is<br />
<br />
is<br />
is<br />
is<br />
string<br />
answering<br />
stringing tonight<br />
tie<br />
out<br />
knot<br />
know<br />
now<br />
not when it's not when it knots when it's not when it knots<br />
not when it's not when it knots when<br />
it's not when it knots<br />
<br />
it is<br />
what it is and what it's notIsaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-79451909953044731522014-11-07T20:49:00.000-08:002014-11-07T20:49:18.905-08:00a node around which knowledge orbitsIsaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-37638805361829410432014-11-07T20:46:00.000-08:002014-11-07T20:46:42.847-08:00even an emotion is an assortment of informationIsaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-68459256950171980252014-07-09T12:16:00.001-07:002014-07-09T12:17:11.519-07:00Room Additions (LA 6/18/14 to 7/7/14)<span style="font-size: large;">(And today [the next day, Wednesday] was another day I
couldn’t leave the house—recovering, socially and financially, from yesterday’s
expense.)</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">After a long talk from my mother, I go onto Indeed to look
for work. On literally the second page, “posted 2 hours ago,” a request for
employees for Barnes & Noble at The Grove. Well, I like when serendipity
works for me. I apply.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I walk to “The Grove.” Locating its approximate position
with my phone, I have trouble actually figuring out how to get in. I see
Nordstrom’s, and assume that’s part of it, but I press on, intent on broaching
the proper entrance to this fortress. I end up walking almost the whole way
around the outside, buffered by garages and apartments and places that are not
The Grove. I enter an area that looks like a different shopping center. A
little further there is a “Farmer’s Market.” There is a carousel. There is a
little structure selling Taschen books. And then I see, past all this fake
quaintness, The Grove:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Horrible citadels rise up, shrines to consumerism—</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">They look like they’ve been here forever, Mayan obelisks
overseen by aliens, or not at all, like they were airlifted by secret
government bases and deposited here mere seconds ago. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I don’t go into B&N that time, but I do return a week
later, and spend a lovely morning browsing their three floors, eavesdropping
upon employees’ complaints about managers and monotonous tasks, and getting the
lay of the land.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">At home, having received no noise complaints, I increase the
volume on my music, with growing confidence</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Unfortunately, a neighbor counteracts by playing their own
music loudly (blaring their bad music). I should have seen this coming.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">It appears that Catherine Waller might have been the friend
to whom R referred when she said she had “a friend putting on a show for the
Hollywood Fringe.” R is following Waller on Twitter, which seems to suggest
that they know each other. I don’t know what to make of this.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">(One other thing: At the end of her 45-minute show, when she
stood, beamed, and bowed, for two moments I thought it was another
character—and the audience’s applause blew my head back.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Good cookie from “Milk Jar Cookies”—like biting into seven
cookies, or sinking into a pillow made of angels</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Wasted money at an art and architecture gallery—</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">If you want to trick an art gallery into bankrolling your
constructs and assemblages, be sure to get your BAs and MFAs from prestigious
universities, to study abroad, to serve on the board of any number of
what-have-yous. Anyone who indulges your work is a sap, but at least you will have
given them the justification to do so. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Whatever artists are foolish enough to apply for a space
without a CV like yours will be turned away: How can they be any good if they
can’t fill a placard of “accomplishments”?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Walk to Sunset Blvd</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Mel’s Diner</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"> I give the
word “jamming” to my waiter, who wore a white cap. He had the rapid-fire,
plate-spinning approach to customer service I find familiar to myself. “How are you?” “Good,” I say. “Taking a break?”
(I guess so—a break that has lasted months, and may last untold months more.)
“Yeah. How are you?” “Oh, you know. I’m here.” “Yeah. You’re jamming.” He’s
already leaving—he laughs. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"> (That’s
what someone told me when I was volunteering serving meals at a church—bouncing
back and forth between bowls of food and their recipients. Someone shouted, in
appreciation, “Now you’re jamming!”)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Book Soup</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">This store is a flurry of staff recommendations—which is a
good thing. For every set of shelves (you know, the width of your body, a set
of shelves) there are probably five or six staff recommendations, handwritten
in marker on pink or yellow paper.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">My guess is (I enjoy losing track of time) I spend two hours
there, working methodically across and around the rooms.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I buy a collection of writings by Clarice Lispector, along
with a biography on Lispector. I have been meaning/hoping to find one of her
books for a while. I think hers is the kind of confused, fragmented, mystical,
inward-searching spirit I find echoed in myself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A billboard of January Jones, “For Your Consideration,” in
her <i>Mad Men</i> dress: “She Loves Pearls,
<b>But Prefers Gold</b>.” Perhaps
intentionally, the sign has been placed above a shop proffering the exchange of
gold.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Guy sitting on the sidewalk jangling a cup asking for
change. I have to walk by him.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I look at him.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Come <i>On</i>.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am passing him.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“<i>COME <b>ONNNNNN</b></i>!”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">For my Senior Project, a friend and I, inspired by an event
that facilitated interactions with the homeless, hung out at a halfway house
for the previously/potentially homeless.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">We interviewed and/or filmed residents, employees, and
policy-makers within the organization.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The man in charge of the organization told us, “Most
panhandlers are not homeless. For the most part, homeless people want to be
left alone. They are wary of human contact. They are not the aggressive types
you find hounding you for money. If you want to help reverse the plight of
homelessness, make a donation to a nonprofit organization.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I take all things with a grain of salt—of course he, the
leader of a non-profit purveyor of services, would advocate you give money to
such services. But it makes sense. The people who are worst off are those who
cannot even communicate. Of course those who have been burned by own society,
scalded by their own families and scorched by their own lobes, back to front
and back again, will shrink at your approach, will babble to themselves as
protection against any unwanted interaction, will rest on a bench with a
blanket over their heads as a statement Do not disturb, I am already and
ever-unavoidably disturbed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And I have not forgotten this. Although I find within the
coming weeks that I make sure to leave the house with some change in my pockets
so that I may plant them in the outstretched hands of vagabonds.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I also wonder—where do the people with cardboard signs get
the markers to write their signs? I suppose it’s an investment.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I think of Peachum in “Threepenny Opera.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Of course panhandlers always have a story—you can’t go up to
someone and say, Give me money. Unless you’re mugging them. In a way,
panhandlers do mug you, but they use guilt and narrative instead of the threat
of firepower.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I can’t remember what I was coming from, but I think it was
another late-night thing with Yoni that gave me the courage to do the follow:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">This was written on the barrier to an embarrassing item I
was attempting to buy from Rite Aid: “Lift Here. Alarm Will Sound.” That
sounded like a contradiction: a request and a warning enjambed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I lifted—but not “Here.” Electronic buzz of caution to
criminals. I closed the barrier. I lifted—this time, “Here.” The buzz resumed,
its tune increasing in insistence. I closed the plastic barrier. The next time,
when I opened the barrier, grabbed my item, and set back the plastic, the alarm
broke into song and did not stop—as if an awoken watchdog launching into
compensatory duty.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I stood there, looking at the latch. I felt relieved—it
could not get any more embarrassing than this, and so, in a way, I was saved.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">An employee came into view from down the aisle. He waved at
me—I held up a hand halfway in placation, in surrender—he waved me on, down to
the cash registers.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I said, “I didn’t understand the warning—” He said, “Yeah, I
don’t know why it does that—” He (a Latino) and the Asian elderly lady at the
cash register appeared to be the only employees left, and the only other people
in the store.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I guess Rite Aid was about to close. It was 10:00. Perfect
timing to be embarrassed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">In the hallway as I leave my apartment, “Refresca y Fria,”
fresh and cold: Box for an electric fan</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Attractive girl walking down the street, talking to her
friend. Her tugged-down shirt exposes her shoulder. She carries two cartons of
water, one in each hand.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Here was the pick-up line:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Excuse me, I think your shirt is slipping. It must be your
jugs—your jugs of water. If you’d like some help, I can hold them for you.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">But of course I say none of this.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Big guy sits in a shaded bulldozer as his friend shovels
into it the pieces of the street.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Book Soup employee who rang me up yesterday I see
crossing the street today. I appreciate the coincidence.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">It’s a red herring, I think. But I will gladly eat red
herring! I eat red herring for breakfast. I will eat red herring and like it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Free KCRW concert in Pasadena</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I wander around looking for the music. Is this some kind of
labyrinth I am not yet permitted to solve? I hear sounds being piped out of
loudspeakers, but I can’t find a band. Signs fling arrows in opposing
directions. Yes, I want to hear “Live Music,” but I also want to see it. I am
also trying to coordinate my location with Edan and T, a friend of Edan and
Yoni’s from high school. Eventually, we find the venue, a square (I had just
not gone far enough into the corridors of the courtyard).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Many people seem to take the concert as an excuse, a
prerequisite, to gather and talk. I feel bad for the band. We meet up with Yoni
and A, a girl from Tinder. Yoni wants to see 22 Jump Street, but it has sold
out and we don’t have reservations. Edan gets money from all of us to go plug
his meter. Yoni and A split from us to have some food, and we reconvene in an
hour or so.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">We go to Intelligentsia. Instead of an espresso shot, I
accidentally order a latte. It’s 10:15 at night (that’s why I’m typing this up
at 1:43 in the morning).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Edan and Yoni regale us of tales of their Israeli fathers in
the army—crashing jeeps, oversleeping from being drugged, getting caught trying
to hitchhike off base—it sounds like the Israeli army version of M*A*S*H*.
Edan’s sister has followed in the family footsteps: dodging work, refusing to
work, impersonating an officer. And she, an American citizen, had volunteered!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Conversational partners’ subtext: “You didn’t tell me I was
crazy. Thank you. Let’s do this again sometime.” (“You listened and responded.
I appreciate that. I am not used to this kind of exchange.”)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“A” gives everyone a handshake that redefines the term
“firm” (more like the requested squeeze in preparation of a blood donation)—each
finger works together, all equal to the task—and we part.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Walking home at 1:00 in the morning: It’s actually quite
peaceful</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Fiesta Auto Insurance</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I watch a movie on my phone, which gobbles up my Cellular
Data because I haven’t thought to direct it through my Wifi</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The next morning, it’s hot—technically not as hot as it is
in Cleveland right now, but it is an alien heat.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The parking lot outside of Staples is where bicycles go to
die: Wheel-less, abandoned. A sign says they have caught someone “yesterday”
trying to steal or cannibalize bicycles, and that bike owners may notify the
LAPD, but this stays up for weeks, and none of the bikes get claimed or moved.
If anything, more join them.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I keep my wits about me (or my half-wits). I seem to inspire
worry in others.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I see this (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi11LVYL8g4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi11LVYL8g4</a>) on
the Annapurna Twitter feed. This isn’t far from where I park my car. I wonder
when it was filmed—was I driving somewhere beneath the drone?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Drinking out of Mason jars, blotting in my atelier</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Auden on trauma: the child needs a trauma (will wait for
one) in order to create—in order to fill the loss the trauma made</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Reflection of traffic light onto sign of phone—makes it look
like the phone is turning on</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I know that face; I’ve made it myself. It means you’re not
sure if you’ll ever see the person again. And you still have more to tell them.
And maybe there won’t be time.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Poetry collection “Eunoia”: Each chapter winches around one
vowel</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Synesthesia:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A is black, contains all, saturated. A is start. Charged.
Absorbs.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">O moon, forlorn. Outward. Concentric, opening. Devouring.
White.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I isolated, individual, limiting, nihilism. Shrinking,
vanishing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">U undulates. Spurt. Loose. A universe of uno (uni-verse) in
flow.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Or A is red—first “color” after white and black</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I and O are opposed. Black and white. Inward versus Outward.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">L-M-B sounds vs. T-K-P sounds, o vs. i. OppOsItes.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Is” and “To be” are empty. No associations. Breaks, blips.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I read the free “LA Weekly” and walk back to where I found
it, return it so that someone else can read it (there are only so many copies
to go around, and they disappear quickly). Is this like what I did with the
newspaper outside my steps?—penance for this? I guess I just don’t want
clutter—I don’t want papers to go to waste.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Intention to drive to Skylight Books. Trying to wait out the
traffic—How can I busy myself? Oh, look, there’s another bookstore. Done.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aladdin Used Books—similar lack of rhyme and reason to The
Last Bookstore, except 75% of the books are in Korean. And it all looks like
it’s in order because the clean, white shelves are tidy, but there’s not,
particularly.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The ad for How to Train Your Dragon 2 that unfurled down the
side of a skyscraper has come down.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">They are putting up a new billboard now: an image of a
triumphant young woman in a coat, fist-pumping. Now they are working on her
crotch.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Skylight Books</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Only one employee. A customer who talked and talked. Though
dense with esoteric stuff, the store is smaller than I thought. It does not
match the picture I saw online.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A week later, when I return for the book I ordered, I am
told to “go next door” to claim it. Literal next door is an empty front with a
locked door. But next to that is “Skylight Books” proper, a place three times
the size of where I had been, spruced by potted plants, and matching the image
I had seen associated with the store.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Turns out the shop I had first perused was the “Arts Annex,”
i.e. the space they bought up because they had too many art books to fit in
their first store.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I kick a broccoli stalk on the sidewalk</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Shaggy dog story: “Museum of Taller Ants” (versus shorter
ants)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Taschen Used Books Sale: “A History of Photography” for ten
bucks</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Most mornings around 6:00 I am briefly awoken by the sounds
of, I assume, somebody homeless going through the cans of trash behind the
apartment.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I imagine that, in the evenings, people hear the same
sounds—furtive clattering, restless movement, shamefully muted noise—emanating
from my apartment window.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">(Later weeks, I stop hearing these noises. I wonder if the
guy has moved on. Same with the woman I used to see with the blanket over her
head on a bus stop bench: I hope that she has just found a new spot, and that
she isn’t dead).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I go to the IHOP up the street. The combination of the
horrible Top 40 Sirius station, my alone-ness, and a miscommunication about the
menu with the waitress (I asked not “What is the difference in price—” but
rather “Is there a difference in price between the regular pancakes and the
pancakes with fruit on them?”) which branded me an idiot, puts an expression on
my faced that forced my waitress (along with some last-ditch, instinctual
effort to save her tip) to say, “Are you OK?”—not in the normal lorem ipsum of
her service profession but as the intervention of a friend—except she was still
a stranger, and I gave her the correct answer for both strangers and friends:
“Yes.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">6:29 on a Friday night and I’m sitting here reading, the
dishwasher to my left, My Bloody Valentine to my right, listening.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Saturday night I get to see Lee Fields and the Expressions
live! At the Troubadour.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Their opener is a disco throwback/modern production outfit, an
international band (a Hispanic on guitar, an Asian on bass, and some swarthy
Shia LaBouf/Balthazar Getty hybrid on drums—maybe Armenian?) providing grooves
for a zesty young black woman.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">She’s got spunk to spare. She sounds like Diana Ross. Her
pop star dance moves do that Californian blend of gymnastics/cheerleading/hot
yoga. In between songs, her voice gives one a slight association with helium. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">When she starts to introduce the last song, she is called
aside by the bassist, who reminds her that there are actually two songs left to
play. Leave it to the Asian to know how to count.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Lee Fields: He is a powerhouse. He is so happy to be here.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">His band functions as one unit. Seven players. Them white,
him black. At 7:1, this ratio, unfortunately, seems to match the audience.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">White guys in front of me make brief fun of his gruff, raspy
voice which is revealed between songs. Well. If your throat was the New York
Metro and you were conducting subway trains of screaming love through its
tunnels, your voice might get a little hoarse, too.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">During the last three songs, a woman with blonde curly hair
dances in the space directly in front of me, never mind the fact that for the
preceding majority of the concert the space to the immediate left of her <i>boyfriend</i> served as sufficient.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Mid-shlep on the walk back home, I buy a Gatorade at a
convenience store. The proprietor makes me wonder: You come to America and you
own/operate a 7-11. You have to serve dumb Americans. Is this any better than
your old life? Were you fleeing oppression? Are you here to provide a better
life for your children? In any case, all I’m thinking is that it must be
disappointing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Your life might not be that different here: bills, traffic,
commercialism. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The grass is always greener? Los Angeles is a desert.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Sign on a utility pole advertising “Room Additions.” At
first I read this as “Room Auditions” and wonder what this could mean. What
kinds of rooms are best suited for particular purposes? I imagine a room’s
acoustics and ambience tested for a band’s rehearsals. Who knows, you might
find the best spot for your cupcake factory is on the third floor of an
apartment building. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">While I am waiting for Yoni to finish using the bathroom at
a Five Guys, a piece of paper blows past my feet on the sidewalk. I pick it up.
I read it. I can’t quite tell what it is. Typewritten and hole-punched in a
manner that suggests a course that has never updated its syllabus, the doubled-sided
page appears to be the history of some sort of cult.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A few keywords and key players stick out, like “Urantia” and
“Vern Grimsley,” but overall I have the impression of history trying to paint
back over itself, whitewashing events that were too odd and mysterious for it
to comprehend in the first place. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I search the page for clues about its author’s intention,
something conclusive like “This guy was crazy” or “And then they all died.”
Although this is a random, disconnected passage, the author’s cryptic approach
to the material gives me the feeling that the rest of the piece would prove
just as oblique.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I show the paper to Yoni when he emerges, and he reads it
with equal curiosity. What’s it trying to say? Who are these people? Google
doesn’t give too much of an answer: the picture produced by the first page of
results is fragmentary—from the perspective of whoever these Urantia followers
would be, and not anybody objectively sane. At least I can finally pinpoint the
time period: sometime in the seventies or early eighties. We decide to leave
the paper for someone else to find. We joke that we are now true believers of
Vern Grimsley.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">We have eaten lunch outside a small place called El Diner; Yoni
declares the shrimp quesadillas to be the best Mexican food he's ever had. We
wander—for some reason Yoni has to have more food, and he spends a while
debating what to eat at an Einstein’s Bagels (a honey-glazed lox bagel). I eat a
brownie.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Back at the apartment, Yoni asked me why I had books
face-down in a stack on my table. I didn’t know why. But I thought
about it later and I realized:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I want a visual representation of what my brain is
interested in at the moment. If I’m interested in movies, the books about
movies will be at the top. If I’m interested in spirituality and typewriter
art, that’s the book that’s going to be at the top. If I’m not, it’ll be at the
bottom. The stack gets shuffled and of course the colors of the spines move
around and it makes a nice kaleidoscoping pattern, and this is more interesting
than having a shelf of books. As to why they’re face-down, it’s because in my
mind the books are sturdier, they have more weight, if they are not face-up.
The stack seems sturdier if the spine is on the right and the cover is down—to
counter the fact that the books will be read in the opposite way. So when I’m
not reading them, I let them reconstitute themselves by placing them at a
reverse.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I show Yoni a poem I intend to read at an open mic. While
walking up Fairfax, I had passed a small, unassuming front, and its sign said
“Da Poetry Lounge.” It claimed, somewhat improbably, to host the second-largest
open mic in the nation every Tuesday night at 9. Turns out this was true, as I
showed up with my poem in my back pocket at 8:45 and saw a line stretching
around the block. And they made all of us stragglers sit on the stage. There must have
been close to 100 people there, half of whom seemed to be on stage sitting
Indian-style squashed up against each other. But more on that later. I showed
Yoni the poem. He said it reminded him of S. I later had to revise the poem,
because I read on the Da Poetry Lounge Open Mic FAQ that all poems had to be
three minutes or less, and mine was five minutes. So I scraped two minutes off
of it, which actually made it stronger. Most of the fat came from the front—it
took me a bit to rev up to full speed, and it turned out that I could just
start off at this point of firing on all cylinders. Here is the final, edited
version of the poem. I wasn’t sure what to call it, but one possible title was
“Abused by the Muse”:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The muse likes to come in through the backdoor, breaking and
entering</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Playful and annihilating</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I can never acknowledge her presence</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A watched pot never explodes</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">She’s a Gorgon to turn me petrified.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I have never seen her, only glimpsed at her reflection in
the cracks in a mirror hidden in shadows through the corner of my eyes,
upside-down and standing on my head</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">This is the only proper way I may address her</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">She is too big for me</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">She needs me</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am tortured for information—</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">What’s it like to be flesh and blood? And she squeezes me to
a pulp, testing my levels</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The muse needs my limbs for her twitching strings</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The back of my skull for her wrecking ball</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">My nervous system for her toboggan</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">My blood for her to course through, to overheat, to steam to
a boil</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">She will switch me</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The way a chair is placed first against one wall and then
the perpendicular</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A feng shui of the synapses</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">She is a truck and I am her roadkill</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am in the passenger seat of her kamikaze biplane</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am the notebook she throws into the garden to decay
through winter and be recovered in spring</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Maybe she’s as angry and confused as I am</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I set myself as bait</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I wander around a field, calling out “Hello?” like a
schmuck, and the muse comes and slaps me across the back of the head, claps,
boxes my ears, and vanishes</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I pad my cell so she may box me
around the loony bin </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am nothing without her</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I have to beg, don’t find me, don’t hurl me into the briar
patch, for her to direct her wanton engine at me</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">She is called by associations</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">She is abated by the intersection of two unalike things—</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">So I venture to faraway places where she could never find
me, where she will always find me—because the force of her connecting,
slamming, speeding like a bullet train, completing the circuit with me within
me in this faraway place will invoke a greater collision</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">For I have allowed her passage to a place she’s never been</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And she eagerly devours nerve endings to pump her form into
new crevices—like squeezing a packet of Gogurt</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Engorging my brain organ</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And yes, I craft it afterwards</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Like a custodian after the orgy</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Like the first wistful purging of the bowels in the
metabolic cycle that follows the banquet</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am a lightning rod with burnt wires</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I will recover, I will gasp for breath</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I will feel elated and ashamed</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And I will defenestrate myself again and again in the hope
that she will snatch me before I hit the ground</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Or at the very least that as I lie there, broken, at the
bottom, in the garden, that she will seep into and replace me and make me into
something less-is-more than what we were.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">…so anyway, I wrote it out on an index card and thought I
might read it. I also planned on getting to Da Poetry Lounge ridiculously early
to sign up, but then the time got away from me, and I didn’t want to look
ridiculous waiting around, and as it turned out the poem wouldn’t really have
fit—</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">—the poets spoke in the tried-and-true cadence of performed
poetry, and the pieces seemed to fall into a few categories: political rants,
lost love or new love, the struggles of the poet’s minority, letters to a
mentor who had died, etc. And audience members just loved snapping their
fingers, which I had previously learned to be the way you show approval at a
poetry slam, but I can’t snap my fingers, and I wouldn’t be doing it all the
time even if I could. The people who got up to speak who said it was their
first time and seemed very nervous (their papers shaking in their hands) all
had this look of exhilaration after they finished to applause. It was all
lovey-dovey. I mean, most of the poets were great. I can’t do what they do. The
poets in the second half were the real newbies—they copied the exact same
cadence, but they weren’t nearly as good, and they performed to a drastically
reduced crowd. I don’t need to go up in front of a crowd to exorcise my demons.
They’re not the kind that can be killed with claps.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The MC had his kid up on stage, too, which was the best part
(the MC at The Last Bookstore open mic had her niece up on stage, so maybe
that’s a thing now). They had a dance battle, which his son won. In between poems, the MC
joked with the DJ behind him on stage, who had been told to “scratch” people off the
stage if they went over the time limit. I suspect that the poets were given a
grace period of thirty seconds or so. We were told that if anybody kept going
after being scratched, music would cut in, like at the Oscars, and if the poet
still kept going, the music would turn up and the lights would go out.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The best performer was a guy who slammed in Japanese, among
other displays of prowess. I liked his line about making double entendres
because he speaks “with two tongues.” That was the best line of the night for
me and I showed my approval by going “Mmm” as some members of the audience were
wont to do.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Rare was the poem that did not mention the poet’s childhood
or parents. I found this funny, and telling. What wasn’t so amusing was having
to sit Indian-style cramped on a stage in a fire-hazard venue for what seemed
like eternity. My butt hurt.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Looks like The Oasis Theatre is where the Koreans have their
church. (It has been empty and abandoned-looking every other time I passed it.)
There is a parking structure set up to accommodate this weekly purpose.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Wheelchair guy crossing the road at night—I prepare myself
to run across the street to flag down any cars barreling down upon him, because
the light has turned green and the cars that have been waiting for him to pass
are blocking the view a new car would need to see him—but he makes it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Comedy show in Eagle Rock</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Maria Bamford, social anxiety, which I love. Good to hear
“showing up” is still the way to move forward.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Honesty works well; “being themselves”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">How is it that some comedians can “open” to the audience,
while others can’t seem to bring the audience in any closer than arm’s length?
(Similarly, some comedians can be themselves, do their own thing, not hinge on
being liked, and they still get liked—well, maybe those two qualities (being
yourself and not contorting for approval) are actually what causes approval.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Usual topics—same as everyone: Looking for love. Trying to
“make it” in your career/dreams. Fighting against your perceived obstacles—</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The best performers have some sort of struggle, some kind of
weight attached to them: having body/weight issues, being gay or black or both,
fearing communication, not being a conventional beauty but figuring out how to
manifest that beauty (So it’s unfortunate that they have had to deal with the
bad shit that comes with being “born that way,” but it might actually make them
funnier, more interesting, more compelling, more worth listening to).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Don’t try to be too clever. Bring the pain. The one who gets
the most vulnerable the fastest and eases the audience into it the most
pleasantly wins!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Email: “___ ___ would like to be paid through PayPal.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Oh really? What a polite way to say “Pay me my money.” I
would like to be paid by somebody, too. Can we just send these invitations to
random people? Will people pay you? This could be better than Kickstarter!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">(Control-F the word “meaning” in a document: “Not found.”
Ah.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Mannequin in a pharmacy window in Los Feliz—rocking a neck
brace, raising her arm up to show off a wrist brace, too</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Saw a sign for the “Don Quixote Café” and tried to find
it—should have known that the quest would prove fruitless</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">But stumbled upon an enclave of a community: cart says “Take
a Book Leave a Book,” and farther up there is an offer “Free Guitar Lessons”
with people sitting around it outside</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Stack of eight fading Huggies boxes under a small palm tree</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Church’s weekend is stacked: “Korean Worship; Hispanic
Worship; English Worship; Filipino Worship”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Bus stop ad for Scarlett Johansson vehicle “Lucy” poses
question: “The average human uses 10% of their brain. Imagine what she could do
with 100%.” If we used 100% of our brain we would soon be back to 10—burnt out,
and realizing that most mundane tasks require little mental effort.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Went to Edan’s house to see fireworks in the valley—a
panoramic view of a few scattered skirmishes</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Jacuzzi and conversation with Yoni, T and Edan</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I slept on the sofa. I wake up, check my email, and see Edan
has tagged me in a photo. “It must have been while I was asleep,” I think,
steeling myself for the worst, because I definitely didn’t submit to any
pictures while I was conscious. It’s not too bad, just Yoni and me with our
eyes closed, listening to music, and T looking at the camera, probably ready to
leave. But Yoni doesn’t like the picture because it makes our Fourth of July
look lame.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">After breakfast, around 11:00 I say, “Well, I think I’m going
to get going soon.” But Edan quashes this idea. Considering I have to drive
back and then walk 40 minutes to get home, there is no particular rush to
instigate this process (which was why I had neglected to leave the night
before—that, and traffic).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Edan wants to see the Neutra house—it’s all the way in
Silver Lake, so Yoni complains, but it’s the best thing we can come up with—but
then I check my phone (all of our phones are slowly dying of battery) and see
it is closed. So we try to figure out what to do. Yoni predicts that if we go
to Santa Monica we will wander around, get ice cream, talk, and not do anything
of much value we couldn’t do closer to home (none of us are particularly close
to one another, let alone anything of interest). Also, it is hot. We spend a
lot of time looking for architecturally interesting places that we can tour
with no notice on a Saturday on a holiday weekend while Edan plays GTA. We end
up driving down the hill to eat Mexican and sit at Starbuck’s and then we call
it quits. We make a plan to meet at LACMA tomorrow for the Bank of America
cardholders’ Free Sunday. Yoni’s main squeeze N, whom I have met once before at
his house, will be joining us.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I walk towards LACMA and call Yoni. I get my ticket and my
sticker. In the next call, he says they are getting food from the trucks across
the street. This food-ordering and eating process, as per Yoni, takes a long
time. Edan takes a picture of N and me in front of a piece of the Berlin wall.
Why? I assume Edan will also take/post pictures of Yoni and N, but no—and it
hits me later that Yoni has probably instructed him not to do so, to preserve
the image that he is unattached, so that any girls he meets on Tinder who looks
him up on FB will not say, hey, what about your girlfriend? Sneaky.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">We run into R again. I am used to this by now.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">We visit the groovy Japanese art building that reminds me of
the USS Enterprise crossed with a submerged seashell crossed with a chapel.
Kimonos.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am clowning around more than I usually do. Stop it, Isaac.
Just stop it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I land a few jokes that make N laugh. Dick jokes seem to
work. I recall Yoni mentioning (in the Jacuzzi) that he and N shared the same
sense of humor.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Wandering. Lookin’ at art stuff.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">On our way out, down the street, they notice something that
I had missed, despite having walked past it a few times: a streetlight speckled
with LACMA stickers. The three of them pick a few colors, thinking that this
will trick the guards into letting them in at a later date. We eat at El Diner.
We walk up the street to get Milk Jar cookies, but it’s a Sunday evening, so
they are closed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I have a hack about my bed sheets. It’s a full-size bed, and
my regular sheets won’t fit it. <i>Oh but
they do</i>: if I lay the top sheet down on the bed and use the springy sheet
to cover me. In fact, I end up doing this for the set of full-size sheets I had
bought on clearance, too, because one of their edges is not long enough to
reach the corner of the bed. I had previously taken a scissors to it, and
thought that that was the hack, but now I just use the two sheets in the
opposite way they were intended and sleep just fine.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">For a while now, I had been looking forward to reading at
The Last Bookstore and hearing what other people had to say. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I had written a piece about The Last Bookstore itself, which
I had been germinating over for a bit. I had been inspired/stymied by the store’s
design (type “The Last Bookstore” into YouTube and you can see some amateur
videos of people running around the store, principally in the upper level known
as The Labyrinth—my poem doesn’t require precise knowledge of the store’s
design, but it’s certainly an added treat.) The piece shifted from being a
scattering of musings into something more Borgesian, Ballardian. Something
fictional, mythical, apocalyptic. As with my poem about the Muse, I found that
I needed to write from the first person perspective rather than dispense
objective statements and “advice;” I needed to dial up the violent,
inflammatory, bodily and religious imagery, etc., in order to elicit
attention/provoke a reaction; and I needed to jettison certain sequences I
enjoyed because they didn’t end up fitting.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">At 7:15, people were waiting in chairs. Sign-up was “at
7:45” but I knew from Da Poetry Lounge that first come first served means the
most fanatically early claim the spoils.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">When they announced that the sign-up sheet was in play, I
got into line—at the end. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">People played guitar and sang, did comedy, did poems, talked
about activism.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The highlight/lowlight was a guy in a do-rag who looked like
he was in his mid-forties even though he was probably in his (black don’t
crack) early fifties.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">He had brought a tape of a beat with him to rap over. The
soundman started the tape. “Turn it up,” the guy said.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Uh oh, I thought.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The chorus of his rap went “Ain’t no stoppin’ this, ain’t no
stoppin’ <i>this</i>—” which he would then
repeat another three times. He had some verses about his accomplishments and
day-to-day life (“Gettin’ paid, gettin’ laid—”), and then it was back to the chorus,
where it was clear his heart really lay: “Ain’t no stoppin’ this, ain’t no
stoppin’ <i>this</i>—”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I wonder what would happen if he actually didn’t stop, I
thought.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And then he did didn’t stop.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">It became like the hip-hop version of “This is the Song that
Never Ends” popularized by Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop. The spirit of Andy
Kaufman was surely impressed. The set of hipsters behind me pronounced him “obnoxious.”
But the guy was just getting started.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“La la la la, la la la <i>la</i>,”
he chanted. “La la la la, la la la <i>la</i>—”</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Eventually he ended, and we all clapped. “Ain’t no stoppin’
him!” the MC said.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">(Actually, the song is still going, because it’s been stuck
in my head ever since.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">My slot ended up being third-from-last, slightly expedited
by the departure of several would-be performers who had decided not to wait it
out. In front of me was a comedian who talked about his unexpected,
spontaneous, ultimately unconsummated excursion into a same-sex hook-up. Then
it was my turn. “Let’s hear it again for the guy before me!” I said.</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“This piece will take me about three minutes to read. It’s
called—”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Last Bookstore</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Books are a virus—“language is a virus” that burrows into
ventricles</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Used books like spent needles</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The books used the people</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The covers had to be shut—</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Like boarding up a wormhole</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A glass house of nothing but shuttered windows</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">We quarantined centuries of questions into the Labyrinth</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And in that arc of used, glued books outside the Labyrinth’s
main maze, we sealed our information, we built a shrine to lost knowledge</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Paper and pulp returned to the status of trees—shelter,
shade, aesthetics, and decay</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The bookstore aspired to be forest</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The workers in the Labyrinth approached their duty like
nature guides, noticing tracks, strange vegetation, the changing in the
arrangement of rocks that made up the sides of mountains. They plugged holes,
preventing landslides.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Labyrinth revealed our books more closely as parts in a
whole, shuffling, like sentences themselves, or letters, rearranged by an
almighty author in furtive purpose only somewhat known to him—the books were
neurons in his brain</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A bit of order, yes, but the pieces scattered at will, and
against him—thoughts were forgotten as books were bought—or forgotten as books
were forgotten, where they were put or what their purpose was</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">We decomposed the pages into the mulch of our collective
unconscious</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Call me Theseus, the narrative the mind told itself, a bit
of string unspooling from remembering to imagining</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Within the wilderness, I’m a hunter-gatherer of words.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I just want there to be somewhere to move, something
underneath, beyond, or through.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I’m moving past the book; my momentum is just past the
book—like the karate master who punches not an opponent’s head but the space
just beyond the opponent’s head.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A book is like a hurtle</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Like the veil before my beloved</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The scrim in front of our secrets</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am obsessed with the image of a decorative carrier that
has forgotten its message, and become only decoration</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The message is impenetrable—the only necessity is to
acknowledge it, just as you would acknowledge a person</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">It is the same message, over and over again</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"> Stressing
its importance</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"> Something
about mortality. Something about the way things work.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"> The
messenger is the minotaur</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"> A flake off
the feather of a fractal</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"> Plotted
against a long enough scale, maybe opening a book and reading it is the same as
looking at a book and not opening it. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The messenger has become the message through its repetition</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">It was never just words, but what emerged—an idea, a connection
between people. And this could never be contained, or closed, or shut. We could
not remove what we could not measure. We could not quantify our qualities.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">If the books were never here, they could not be destroyed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And where nature and books meet again, in this mingling of
oracles</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The next step is going back to writing on the beach with a
stick, as words wash back into the sea with the tide</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The message, “it is”</span></div>
Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-38260235522464076462014-06-19T17:38:00.000-07:002014-06-19T17:42:41.719-07:00Wilshire Will Be Reduce (LA 6/3/14 - 6/17/14)<span style="font-size: large;">For $90 a month I parked under a golfing range in Koreatown,
forty minutes by foot from my apartment.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">(I didn’t know this until after I had paid—I thought the
green-themed “Open Bank” advertisements were for a bank—I walked to the top
floor of the garage, and there was a green net above my head, and people were
whacking golf balls.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Walking back (I’m a flaneur):</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Old lady in blue tracksuit and brown curls, her glasses
almost to her lips, walks into “For Lease”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Crow in a dirt lot</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Citrus Avenue and Sycamore Square”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“1984: Private Defense Contractors”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">[The journey across the country stripped layers from my
soul, as trees disappeared into brush, into plains, into sand into rocks, and
eternal mountains rose up reasserting our insignificance]</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">WILSHIRE</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">WILL BE</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">REDUCE</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">TO ONE</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">LANE</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">6/12/14</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">TO</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">6/16/14</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">EXPECT</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">DELAYS</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">(Traffic control sign aspires to haiku)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">(Female employee in Beverly Hills wedding gown store after
close—someone is always getting married—dozens a day—expensively)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Spending too much time on <a href="http://www.quora.com/Isaac-Mell">Quora</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">[On my first full day in LA, already a celebrity sighting:
Saw ____ _____ (name redacted). Looked like he could be angry—or a reluctant
leader—or wry. So, pretty much his characters, but with five children (their
absence from his oeuvre actually removing the cause of his personality) and a
sullen, omnipresent dad (which is more on the nose).]</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I have a relationship with the neighbors in their adjoining
bathroom where I can hear one of them singing John Legend in the shower, or both
of them talking while the water runs. (Eventually I hear them less—and I wonder
if they are aware of my presence.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">(I can hear them watching The X-Files. On Netflix, I
assume.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Four UCLA student poets (I was late, missed the first (or
the fifth)) read their work at the Hammer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">A professor, at the conclusion of the reading, embarrassedly
admits he didn’t realize how dissimilar they were from each other until hearing
them tonight, which makes everyone laugh, because my God, they were nothing
alike. Thankfully.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I value hearing their poetry aloud, spoken by the
personalities that birthed them, unreduced to the typewritten.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Their best works, collectively, were moments of solitary
contemplation—usually in the cold—doing something—walking up the hill to a house,
ice fishing, entering a coffee shop in the wee small hours, and something about
electrons and a lighthouse, while writing a paper(?).</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">During the last poet’s session, Yoni (he has made it to even
fewer of the poets: only two of the five) nods at her, who has shouted about
Lilith and mourned her lost spiritual advisor, and whispers to me, “I can smell
your arousal.” Actually what he can smell is me trying <i>not</i> to be aroused. I am unwittingly matching her energy while
willingly clamping myself from levitating. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Afterwards, Yoni goes to talk to her. He has marked her as
the second-most attractive girl in the room, and, like a game of chess, or a
training exercise, he will talk to her before encountering the first-most (who,
in the meantime, leaves—with her boyfriend?). He compliments her performance
and initiates non sequiturs:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Slam poetry can be bad—”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Oh, yeah, just awful—”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“It <i>can </i>be good—”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“”Oh! For sure, yes, it can—”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">She is needlessly, manically nervous. I lurk, comically,
peering out from behind Yoni’s left shoulder. I do not introduce myself, nor do
I speak. Bound by the rules of engagement, when she tells Yoni it was nice to
meet him, she cannot, turning to me, say the same, for we have not met.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Departing the Armand Hammer Museum: “I use ‘Arm and
Hammer’!” I exclaim. Yoni muses if Mr. Hammer was Jewish. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Shabbat dinner at Yoni’s family’s.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Saturday morning:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">R drives, H in the passenger, B in the back right, me in the
left.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I give H Sharpies for her birthday, which will later come in
handy at the improv show (at which we are to write our fake alliterative name
on Hello My Name Is stickers).</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I run my mouth. I get to know them again. We fall into our
natural rhythms.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Camera store: R buys a replacement Holga for H as a gift. B
talks about Netflix and studying to be a social worker. (“It surprised me, but
not everybody is in it to help people.”)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">At the Bradbury, I offer some historical-aesthetical context
about Blade Runner.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">[The Last Bookstore: Separate post to come]</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Hours there, and books—so many that (my fault) we can’t
visit the library (which is probably where they should have taken me first).</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Dinner at a vegan place staffed by a sole young woman.
Nobody knows what to order. The waitress/cook makes a recommendation; it’s what
the current customer is eating. Three of us order it. A fig sandwich.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Comics shop for the improv show—so this is where all the
nerds are in Los Angeles.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">And we finish it off with ice cream at a place called, to my
amusement, “Milk.” A new head-shaker in attempted elegant simplicity. Goofy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The next day, Sunday, eager to use my Bank of America credit
card to gain free admission, I walk the four blocks to LACMA. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">A room of rescued photos from the artifice of thirties film
sets—</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I quickly find (it finds me) the entrance to the cubists,
Dadaists, surrealists, modern fuckers, Abstract Expressionists. Inspired, I
take notes from the curators’ texts on my iPhone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I am gleeful. Glee-ed. Soon, at each painting, I pose the
way the painting makes me feel: If there’s a subject, I assume their position.
If it’s figure-less, I summon what I believe to be the energy of the painting
and express it through my posture. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I am laughing. I think of the ways you experience a museum
as one person instead of part of a pair, or one of a group. A Rothko painting
makes me almost cry. I see the struggle for the spiritual. I see the pressure
on both sides, above and below, with a hot fusion core in the center. … And it
only hits me as I’m writing this just now that the last UCLA poet was probably
talking about this very painting in her mini-poem about Rothko. I didn’t
understand the poem—something about one of the colors being “daddy issues”
confused me: The painter’s, or the poet’s? But perhaps understanding is
overrated in a relationship: You only have to make the choice to be together.
Maybe there is more to discover, more years that will bloom, if understanding
eludes you from the outset. But again—she was crazy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I see three sculptured assemblages and the text on the wall
mentions four—the fourth, of course, referred to as the artist’s most
incendiary. I ask a guard, and he gladly volunteers that the piece is in
storage. Actually, I seem to remember seeing it at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
He wishes me good day, and we part, charmed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I make my way with leisure through the decades of striving
starving artists. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Approaching the passage out of a large room—as if drawn?—I
can see the threshold to another: Like I was dreaming—I recognized the
configuration of several people at once—like a dream—like a memory of the
previous day—like an out-of-body experience—</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Framed by the wall to their right and the light to their
left: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">R’s back to me, N looking down in profile. Then H came into
focus and I knew that it was real.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">H sees me first, or maybe I meant to address her first (probably
a combination of both); B facing the other way, turning around.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And I know how J feels when uninvited. But of course it is
on account of N. I say, “Thanks for inviting me.” A Rorschach test, equally
interpretable as joke or accusation. R
looks uncomfortable, caught. N asks, “Was this planned?” As if I had emerged
from Door Number 2 on This is Your Life, which, of course, I had. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">H might be happy to see me: another friendly face. I babble,
my verbal fight-or-flight response—exhaust the enemy—I tell them I’ve been
weirding out patrons by posing like paintings. N says, “Yeah, that’s weird.”
And there’s really nothing to say, as I shuffle across the x-axis of the four
of them, and within more mere moments of halting speech we have reconfigured,
and I am looking at them poised to enter the room I have crossed, and they are
looking back at me turned to them in mid-step towards the room they have already
walked, and I am telling H I will catch up with them later. Let us simmer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And we do meet up again, in an hour and a half, after much
muttering to myself and recalcitrant looking at paintings, for lunch in the
museum patio. A conversation passes, or something like it. I try to ask
questions like I normally do. I try to talk about how the Rothko made me feel—I
sound both inarticulate and pretentious. The man sitting at the table next to
us leaves—disgusted, I imagine, with my half-stammered pedantry.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">We look at art. We are told to take off our shoes (and
replace them with white mesh) before entering a space by James Turrell, an
arctic-psychedelic void. Its color throbs and its edges dissolve, easing you
into disorientation. N and B leave after two minutes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I walk slowly to the far wall. I look at the guard. I stare
forward at the void. I have been smiling. I reach my arms behind me. I touch
the wall. The guard says, “Don’t touch the wall!” I leave. Why does the void
have rules—rules other than gravity? I have wanted to ask the guards, who have
told me don’t touch, stand back, no pictures, “Can I touch you? Can I take a
picture of you?” I guess it’s there in the name, guard, but you’d think the
role of museum employee would be one of acceptance and permission, not
prevention. “Enjoy the painting!” they should say, “I do!” If they don’t want
anyone taking pictures, they should just blind us, amputate our hands, remove
our memories. Why have patrons at all? Lock the art away. Someone might experience
it; someone else might share the experience with yet others.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And of course a picture can’t compare. My surreptitious
photo of a Calder mobile didn’t turn out—what’s more, the mobile wasn’t in motion,
which is a contradiction. I remember with fondness my dad, walking through the
Cleveland Museum of Art, blowing upwards, prompting Calder’s mobile into its natural
state of grace.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">N asks, “Why did you leave?” I don’t have a good answer,
offering instead something about needing only a certain amount of time to suss
out the qualities of the room. N and B wander off. I check my phone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">H and R leave after the full allotted twenty minutes. H,
smiling, reports satisfaction with the void’s sensations of disconnection, and
I think she might enjoy being high.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I guess we should see more art. Unfortunately, it’s all
futbol and phalluses. They (N, B, R & H) ask me to take a picture of them—</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Actually, before that, a woman asked me to take a picture of
her and her boyfriend. She explained, as he protested, that she wanted it in
the style of the picture behind them: two kids looking serious on a bench. I
get on one knee and frame her iPhone like the photo, but unfortunately the man
is blocking half the picture, which is too small anyway. The woman asks me to
take it again. I zoom in this time, to better see the picture, but now their
feet are cut off, but the woman accepts this, or maybe she can’t bring herself
to ask me to take it a third time.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">—so I take their (N, B, R & H’s) picture, and that’s
all, we say goodbye, and I walk away.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Smiled at a hot nun after her habit had almost blown off</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Later, I drive to the Walt Disney Concert Hall—lower level—the
Redcat Theater. For a dance-on-film festival called “Dance Camera West.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">When deciding which event to attend, I chose the program
that included the winners of a high school and college competition. In the same
way that I went to the UCLA student poetry reading, I wanted to see what the
youngins were up to, people around my age, enthusiasm, and level of progress in
their artistic practice. Predictably, they weren’t very good, like most amateur
videos. One was cool, with two guys flopping around a skate park. The images
doubled and mirrored.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And then I was in for a whole feature-length movie—the event
most of the audience wanted to see. Something Indian. (It seemed like at least
75% of the audience were Indian, many in saris and what-have-you, traditional
dress.) A “documentary.” Oh well. Maybe I would learn something.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">It started out a little awkwardly, a little lo-fi, the
typical talking-head with clips thrown in. But, like a dance, spinning faster
hypnotic circles, the story tightened as its scope widened:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Jason Samuels Smith, a black tap dancer in his early
thirties, from the hood in New York, is asked to go to India. It’s not clear
why. Gregory Hines has died, years before of course, but it’s one of the
reasons JSS feels lost. He’s at a crossroads, thinking he might give up tap and
go live in the woods. Somehow, he gets this gig in India, where he will meet
Chitresh Das, a dancer of the Kathak discipline, who is in his sixties.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Das is small, excitable, something of a ham, but he yearns
to bring the dying Kathak form to the masses—it can’t be what it once was, but
he can keep it alive. Kathak is complicated—you wear bells on your ankles, and
you can’t even don the bells until you have committed yourself to years of
preparatory training. Das spins. He moves like lightning. JSS is impressed,
almost immobilized. He gives the dances his own spin.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The film follows their tour of India and their friendship.
They are connected by their mutual appreciation: They know a fellow master when
they see one. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Their outward differences don’t matter. Switching off, they
improvise to challenging Indian drum patterns, highly focused yet open at the
same time, locked into each other, rhyming their moves, one-upping each other, until
the energy that has been swirled up by their performance reaches a climax. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">JSS is slow, hip-hop lackadaisical when waxing poetic—except
when he’s dancing. And then it’s like his legs are—but I can’t even describe
it. I don’t even want to. Same with Chitresh Das. I’m going to pull a reverse
HP Lovecraft and say that their dances—after the movie they walked out in front
of us and performed!—are too beautiful for me to describe. Suffice to say that
I was moved.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And Das told us, Have fun. Acceptance, discipline, respect.
The audience loved it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">On Monday I did not leave my apartment, but several Latinos
entered it, one after another, to fix my window. It’s not my window—it’s not my
apartment—it’s not my problem. But I didn’t say this, and the succession of
Latinos fixed it regardless.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">An email from Sears that my part had shipped—not mine, but
someone with a similar email address: not Mell Isaac with a dot in the middle,
but Melissa Acy with no dot. I forward her the message.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Tuesday, another dance event: Dancing and writing about
dance. Cross-curricular, could be cool. At the Central Library. Paid too much
for parking, didn’t realize one lot validated for the library.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Simone Forti would probably not be offended to be called an
aging hippie, but she’s smart, and she understands that simplicity can be the
hardest thing to do.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">She improvised a piece for us: She walked, blew through a
gas pipe, mused out loud, worked through her mental process in front of us. She
used water as a metaphor, and built up her themes, and returned to them. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Then, two dancers, a woman and a man. Probably in their late
twenties or early thirties (dancers are well-preserved, after all), she a white
woman with short purple hair, he a tall black man. They pull off one of the implicit
goals of dance: projection of the dancers’ personalities, even (especially) in
the execution of precise, dictated moves. She seemed skeptical, defensive, yet
confident. He seemed calm, confident, yet sensitive. They paired well, and were
extremely good. They performed to a drummer. More on their performance later.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Afterwards, the choreographer talks—she mentions that her
father died in the midst of her working on the dance. The moderator (herself a
writer/dancer, but I’ve skipped her) asks, how did you know when the dancers
should hold hands? The choreographer says it came out of improvisation and
practice, and states that, even though they had to hold hands briefly, they
could not look at each other: “It would have been too much.” Everyone agrees.
It’s about how we are separate and apart, but somehow connected. Unfortunately,
a lot of dance seems to be about the failure to communicate (at least the ones
I’ve seen recently).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I compose an email to her the next day:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Thank you for your choreography at yesterday’s LA Central
Library event. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Because of the themes in the previous dance, I couldn’t
help but see water, the drummer funneling, phasing a stream with his cymbals,
the dancers stroking, swimming with arcing arms and gasping lungs. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Two people, two histories, two parallel universes, in the
briefest of contact but ever isolated. Mirroring streams that touch but never
converge.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“The dancers, complements in confidence and sensitivity,
trawling a spectrum of skepticism and reception, abandon and collection.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Swiftness and slowness, playfulness and mournfulness, given
equal weight.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Thank you again, and my condolences on the loss of your
father.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Well, it looked better in Microsoft Word than in Gmail. Too
effusive/proto-poetic to find in your inbox. In any case, she thanked me for writing
the note, appreciated hearing about how I saw the dance, and to have “met” an
audience member, and wished me well.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Geek employee at a geek shop putting on a fake British
accent—unless she was putting on a fake American accent with her co-worker.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">On La Brea: Before me, a woman’s legs. Next to me, a
chemical mixing plant—a different kind of factory.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Maybe it’ll be good when we all have Google Glass. That way
we won’t all be standing around like jackasses holding up a rectangle when we
take a picture. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And it’ll make our lack of privacy more obvious, a little
less easy to ignore.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">There is an opening night party for the Hollywood Fringe, a
festival that gives frustrated writers, actors and directors an outlet for
their plays.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I walk to the spot, a bar called The Dragonfly, where I hold
the wall for an hour and a half. A froglike man tells me he is majoring in
Chicano studies. He has glommed onto me after I answered a question (“Is this
the right place for—?”). We are there early, before anyone else. I have a shot
of tequila, my go-to drink to order at a bar, and I wonder in what combination
the Chicano major, the tequila, and my own self-sabotage forces me to stand
there motionless. The place fills up, a band plays, people take video and
pictures. At one point, I get behind the wall, and seriously consider pushing myself
up onto it and dancing; you know, doing something weird to attract attention.
But there isn’t a good chance, and it’s clear that, in this case, given the
choice between Option A, acting normal, and Option B, acting the fool, I will
take Option C: I will just leave. And I do.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I growl in my head: I have nothing to say to people when I’m
standing right next to them; how could I create art that speaks to their souls?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">(I match people/modulate—unfortunately, I tend to resort to
their anxieties and fears—or my own—)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">(I feel like people expect me to do something
amazing/dangerous at any given moment, and when I don’t, they’re doubly
disappointed, I’m that much more uncool.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">(People can’t predict me. A) I’m alone in situations that
seem strange. B) I’m running through all behavior in my head to find the
best/most appropriate <i>or</i>
funniest/most unusual connective.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Can we call it karma? It must be because I didn’t respond to
the woman who asked if I was making jam. I was walking home from Target
carrying Mason jars. I could have just said, no, they’re for drinking out of,
but I was almost out of earshot, and she could have been crazy. And I was
walking home from Target carrying Mason jars.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">But I was looking forward to a performance the next night,
at 10:15pm, something called “The Creeps.” I had looked over the Hollywood
Fringe website, writing down the names of plays that sounded intriguing, and it
was really the only one I thought I had to see. Here is my review, which I
wrote and posted, when prompted by automatic email, on the Fringe website:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Distortion reveals—darkness liberates—hysteria serves as
the foot soldier of truth. ‘The Creeps’ forces us to confront our broken
counterparts.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Talk, literally talk, to creatures that don’t exist,
funneled through one woman metamorphosing into vastly different physical and
psychological figures in the space of a blackout.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Catherine Waller frees these creeps from the corner of your
eyes and the edges of your limbic system. In this dark comedy, you laugh as
your hair stands on end, trying to escape.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Intentions turn ambiguous, reality shifts in a moment, and
paradoxes dance—when the most hospitable is the most sinister, when the most
pathetic is the most noble, when the most exploited is the most in need, when
the most battered is the most cruel. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Twisted by their own evil or their own need for salvation,
each creep is both abuser and abused: Cast-offs, relegated/exiled to a basement
of terrors where modern-day and fairy-tale detritus decay in the same heap.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Anything can happen, because the creeps can see you. You
can’t hide. You’re paralyzed in your chair.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“You think: I can’t become one of these creeps. I have to
get out of here. I can’t be associated with them. And as they treat you as
their own, you feel yourself distorting, disintegrating, becoming grotesque.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Will you listen to the evil and fall for it? Will you
embrace the good, even if it is damaged, infected, deadly? Can you save anyone?
Will you dare? Can you save yourself?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“The creeps are isolated—they enjoy the company—but you
might not be able to leave. They might keep you there forever. Indulge them,
and let them mingle with your own enigmas, demons and malformations.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“You will leave relieved. At least you’re not doomed,
controlled, locked in eternal pain and confusion like the creeps.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Except we are. And that’s the comedy of ‘The Creeps.’”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Again, way too effusive for daytime hours, but hey, I felt
compelled. What I didn’t include in the review, because I felt it’d be
spoilers, was this description of Waller’s four characters:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">“A Mephistophelian lizard MC; a mutilated laborer, complicit in his own loss; a
stripper betrayed by her own biology, animated by the juice of her possessors
(and imagined saviors); an amputated child tyrant, doubling her trouble.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">To go into even more detail, because, again, at this point
it doesn’t matter: The third character was a pregnant stripper, hooked on meds
by her employer. She was my favorite. A pregnant stripper? Come on, that’s just
a cool character.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And I learn a new word: “bouffon.” A clown, who reveals to
his hoity-toity crowd their emptiness—this message smuggled within his humor.
Wikipedia says that in Paris at some point all of the ugly, diseased people
were forced outside its walls, and they were invited back only on holidays,
during which time they were forced to perform, and the performances of these
bouffons, of course, held malice at their very core.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And: “The ideal performance for a bouffon is one in which
the audience laughs, has a great time, goes home, realizes their life is
meaningless, and commits suicide. [Pause for laughter.] Obviously this is an
idealized version. [Pause for more laughter]”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">LA is that mix, that amalgamation, that crossroads, that
death, that passage, that point of hope and failure</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Red shopping cart, white motorcycle, purple apartment</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Latino teens looking at a shofar, passing it around,
laughing. Its presumable owner warns them not to smell it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Yoni invites me to an “avant-garde jazz show” with an old
friend. I ask him if I know the friend. He says he doesn’t think so—M? I say oh
yeah, we went to a jazz thing before, the three of us, and I farted in the car.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Yoni texts back: Oh yeah!!! LOL! I remember lol</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">It was probably the second-smelliest fart of my life. It was
impossible to ignore. M thought it was Yoni (or at least, the rules of decorum prevented
her from accusing anyone other than the individual she had met before that
night). He evaded the question—“My farts don’t usually stink!”—but neither did
he finger me as the culprit. And I, like a bastard, let him be a true friend
and take the fall.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">In my head, I flash-forward to the evening before me:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Yoni: “M, Isaac has a confession he’d like to make. Don’t
you, Isaac?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Isaac: “Yes. M, I farted in the car. It was me—not Yoni. And
if we are all very, very lucky, we might just be able to repeat that experience
tonight.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Perhaps dreading this exchange, I am a half-an-hour late to
the concert—even later, because, assuming this is a proper concert, I drive
past the venue, a squat art gallery—but the concert itself has not started.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A young guitarist pedals his way across Arizona desert,
African plain, Arcturan celestiality. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Next musician plays woodwinds to cassettes of his “favorite
improvisers” first picking up their instrument after a day’s abstinence.
Beautiful, eliciting the latent in what was there. Improv-exploration meets
composition after-the-fact. Woodwinds phase; pages flutter to floor.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Steampunk saxophone—like a dinosaur carcass, cyborged with
blue-streaming thermostat. Sax, pedals
and mic collude into a sound like a swarm of bagpipes, a million motorcycles
exploding in mid-Evil Knievel-style-air, an astronaut at the speed of light,
off his rocket—inevitably, exploding. He weaves like his sax will be sucked
into a vertical slit of a singularity. He is “picturing fear,” and how you face
your fear or deposit it in a backpack and carry it with you.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I love it. Does anybody else? The sound has
bounced-slammed-busted around all walls, sending Yoni out for earplugs.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Lastly, older hippie man leaves his house with gongs for the
first time. Mallets, winds. Earth and sky. Slow echo—gongs as the original
feedback/resonator!, bringing the evening to a thematic close—hovered over by a
flurry/tizzy of technics, blowing whispers of timelapsed spiderwebs through his
reeds.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">My erstwhile flatulence remains unclaimed (has the statute of
limitations run out?), and I emit no noxious gases while in M’s presence. Yoni
and I eat pizza on a bench. He invites me to his friend’s house tomorrow for a
barbecue.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">They are smart, funny people, some of whom I’ve met. I
secure my place as one of them with a comment. On the subject of believing only
half of what you read, J says he has come across the theory that we are sending
100 people a year to Mexico to be abducted by aliens so that the aliens will
give us the Internet.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“We <i>do</i> need the
Internet,” I say.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Other topics: A businessman sheikh heir who buys out a
competing casino because the first one gave away his table. Someone’s neighbor
is losing his motor functions—through typing, he tells his family that he
understands the concepts, he just can’t get them out. And lots and lots of
stories about people they know, or used to know, or are glad they no longer
know.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Yoni talks about how he was a bully in elementary school. In
fact, he turns to the bro next to him, an aspiring golfer, who has recently
shown up, and whom he claims to have only met “a few times,” and he asks:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Did I bully you?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“You did.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“I’m sorry, man—”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I stay at the barbecue for several hours, even after Yoni
has left. I excuse myself sometime around 9pm.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">La Brea:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Lenin head</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The locksmith’s was locked.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The same shop over and over again—old clothes for hundreds
of dollars, a few art books, a few more LPs, one employee. One had a
barbershop; another had sand.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Cages and cash registers, Buddha heads and teak doors,
mannequins—like the people starting their own bookstore by buying books from
The Last Bookstore.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Antiques, ancient belief systems, eastern statues, eastern
talismans, anything to root you </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Hollywood prop rental shop: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Photograph: “Mormons serving their term in a Utah
penitentiary for polygamous practices, 1890”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Under it, newspaper piece about Charlie Parker from his
mother: She looked outside and thought it was snow—empty Benzedrine containers.
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">(Now, how is this something you would rent? Seems like
something only to be abandoned or stolen. A curiosity.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Infant Nutrition Information” binder filled with Desert
Storm trading cards</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Bob Health Hope Center</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Gallery Voila: “They’re bird skeletons for educational
purposes from Belgium in the seventies, hand-dipped in silver” (I hadn’t asked).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Super Cuts haircut from a man named Salvador. At the end he
removes a wet towel from a microwave to my left and scuttles it across my
scalp.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Newspapers, editions of the LA Times, have been sitting on
the steps to the apartment complex for days at a time. On Sunday night, I help
myself to the current edition. I cut the cords, read the entertainment section,
and return the paper to its original place. The next day, it is not there
anymore. But in the following days, the newspapers still pile up, unbroached,
unread.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I imagine an altercation with the subscriber:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“You can’t just take the paper!”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“No one was reading it. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“You didn’t pay for it!”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Yeah, but you didn’t read it. Is it so odd that, if a paper
is paid for, that someone should read it, even if it’s not the person who
paid?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“You’re a thief! You—” And so on.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Bus ride back to the Hammer for Bloomsday. Down Syndrome
bodybuilder.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">When I get to the Hammer, I see an extremely attractive,
intelligent-looking woman, and I imagine she smiles as I friendlily barrage the
museum volunteer with questions of, is this the line, what is this the line
for, how much will it cost me when I get to the end of the line. As I am
waiting in line, her boyfriend appears. “Goddammit,” I say to myself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The theater is filled, so the rest of us are shunted to the
adjoining room for a telecast. This produces occasional moments of humor as when
a member of the (actual, in-the-flesh) audience hugs someone in front of the
camera, or when the close-up camera operator focuses on entirely the wrong
person and won’t budge, until his feed is cut and we get the wide angle again.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And then the reading of passages from Joyce’s Ulysses begins,
his stream of consciousness spread out across two women and four men (and two
opera singers and a pianist performing Irish songs “of the day”). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The performers orate in Irish accents, only two of which I
surmise as genuine. They look like they’re having a lot of fun. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I hadn’t read it. I had no idea it was so much like
Tarantino! References to and theories upon other art it likes. Breaking the rules. It’s also
like Shakespeare. Incomprehensible in long passages, a penchant for puns, well-read.
Digressions. Pronouncements. Comedy and tragedy. Inspiring you to write, but
also dispiriting (you’ll never reach that level of wanton genius).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">We are invited to stick around for more Irish singing and
dancing. I see a redhead. I have the perfect pick-up line—“Yes?”—because the
ending to Ulysses, performed just minutes before, wends itself around the
repetition of that word, in a punctuation-less, sexy, world-encompassing
affirmation. But I don’t strike when the iron is hot, and, preemptively, pre-emptily,
I leave in lieu of the line.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I read that spontaneous people are attractive to us because,
given the fact that they do or say whatever they think to do or say at the
moment, they are not deceitful, and therefore are trustworthy, and we can have
civilization. (Although if they are <i>too</i>
spontaneous, we can’t trust them to show up or follow through. I think of my
attempts at meeting with S, who tells me she can get me a job as a marketing
writer. I ask her the name of the company—twice—but she doesn’t acknowledge
having been asked. We make plans to meet, but she pushes them back, and pushes
them again.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">It’s a real cat-on-the-roof situation: “The cat’s on the
roof—oh, the cat fell—oh, the cat’s in the hospital—oh, the cat died.” We don’t
meet.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Drove to Pasadena</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Spent too much money in a bookstore</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Extreme pizza shop employees—woman looked like she had been
beaten, bruise across the face. One with tattoos. Another one, a lesbian with
piercings.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“First time here?” I wish I could say, no, I’m here all the
time, I’ve just always got this shocked look on my face. I wasn’t taken aback
by the employees’ ink or wounds, but by their enthusiasm. I can’t deal with
this kind of spunkiness if I’m expected to muster up the same. It’s one factor
too many when I’m ordering a pizza. Sorry.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Instead of “The Signal,’ which I’m an extra in, and which
might be visually interesting but conceptually vacant, I see “The Immigrant.”
Deciding factor: cinematographer Darius Khondji, one of my favorites. And it’s
about one of my favorite time periods, the twenties.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">It turns out to be the kind of movie that makes me want to
give up writing, let alone movie-making.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Joaquin Phoenix—the things he does with his face—with a gun
to his head, with his enemy at the table in front of him, with a woman in his
thrall or out of it—his fear, his love and hate, his injuries and injustices.
He takes risks, he is vulnerable, he is monstrous, he is human. I mean, my God,
I was crying.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Jeremy Renner—the perfect embodiment of the narrative
requirement: surprising and inevitable. He is a magician, a dancer, a romantic.
How might this turn out poorly for everyone?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Marion Cotillard—as an actress and as her character, she is
smarter, more beautiful, more prepared and intuitive than anyone else. But she
is trapped. People ask: Why does she stay with a man seemingly responsible for
her undoing? Is it because: He understands her? Are they kindred twisted
spirits? Is he, in fact, more dedicated, more intelligent, more empathetic,
more capable, than anyone else?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The movie is a perfect ball of layers, of being disgusted and
compelled by something or someone, and in this way bound. As mentioned, my
words are a poor substitute for the movie itself, so I will limit myself to
details of anything but the first shot and the last shot:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The opening shot is of the Statue of Liberty, zooming out to
reveal the back of a man’s head, looking at it. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">At first we think it’s just an image of America, rooting us
in a specific time, a symbol of “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But
later Marion Cotillard, the immigrant, is made to dress up as the Statue of Liberty, and she is
coveted. The first image is actually about wanting to <i>possess</i>: liberty, America, a woman, hope, freedom.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The final shot is of two characters leaving in a boat, seen
through a shack’s window, while a third character leaves the shack in the
opposite direction—but reflected in a mirror, <i>so it looks like he is joining them</i>. It’s amazing. It’s an elegant
solution to a problem: How do we show all of the people in a single shot? How
do we play with the fact that the third character is not joining them? Will he,
in fact, always travel with them, a memory impossible to abandon?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And it’s also frames within a frame, and a contrast of light
and dark—</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Darkness is frightening, but, as it envelops, it embraces in
amber shadows—</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The light is mundane, dull, like you’re going blind, white-blue—</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I sit in my chair, stunned, as the credits commence to roll. Then I hear
a middle-aged woman complaining to her compatriots: “The extras were too clean!
The ending was too happy! Cotillard was miscast!”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">She has it completely wrong. I want to shout at her: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A) Don’t you understand that it’s a fairy tale? If you want
to see actual immigrants, build a time machine! If you want a movie, try making
one!—with extras and sets and costs!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">B) Don’t you understand that the film ended on the beginning
of the fourth act? It’s not a happy ending—so much is left for us to consider
that could go wrong!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">C) And how is Cotillard miscast? Her character is a
performer, someone who becomes what others want her to be while holding true to
the focus within her. It is Cotillard herself. In fact, I later learn that the
movie was written explicitly for her!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I return to my car, where I eat the pizza leftovers which I
feared would melt from the heat through their box and into my seats. I return
to Vroman’s Bookstore to hear an author speak.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">He speaks, slower and more Southern than I had assumed from
his prose. But he is also my grandma’s age, who’s in a wheelchair, in a home.
This guy had dyed hair and glasses, and asked to have questions repeated to him
due to “many years of rock concerts,” but we had all assumed he was in his sixties
or seventies, not eighties. It must be the Yoga.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">He is bound by his publishers to sign only copies of his
newest book, and, even then, to write nothing more than his name and the name
of the recipient—no personalized messages. But he offers to sign anything sent
to his address. He is nothing if not accommodating. I ask him what he normally
writes when he is allowed to make personalizations. He says, “Whatever they
tell me to. I can’t make anything up.” He is being both ironic and truthful. He
is a bestselling author.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">He talked about, pre-“career,” being in the wrong place at
the wrong time, but how the right place at the right time might have been the
wrong place and time, considering he went on to write with such success. I
compare this, inescapably, to myself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">On my way back to my apartment after parking my car under
the golfing range in Koreatown, I do the math: He has written nine novels,
starting in the early seventies. He told us tonight that it takes him about
three, three-and-a-half years to write a book (Wikipedia reveals this to be
more like four or six). I work backwards. He’s eighty-two now. However you
break it down, you’re talking about a forty-year career, nine novels.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"> Could he have started
earlier? Or would that have been impossible, given the state of his development
as a writer at that time? What does true success look like?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I wrack my brain, as I always do, to try to get it to tell
me what I want and how to go about getting it.</span></div>
Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-62839708880255427582013-09-17T09:38:00.001-07:002013-09-17T09:38:06.243-07:00<a href="http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2013/09/parking-day-community-in-a-parking-space/" target="_blank">http://www.coolcleveland.com/<wbr></wbr>blog/2013/09/parking-day-<wbr></wbr>community-in-a-parking-space/</a>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-89680825230146019752013-02-18T13:48:00.000-08:002013-02-18T13:48:01.200-08:00<a href="http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2013/02/the-cleveland-mini-maker-faire-wants-your-ideas/">http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2013/02/the-cleveland-mini-maker-faire-wants-your-ideas/</a>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-13552971296959274972013-01-29T12:57:00.002-08:002013-01-29T12:57:44.974-08:00<a href="http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2013/01/transformer-station-launches-in-ohio-city/">http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2013/01/transformer-station-launches-in-ohio-city/</a>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-42680159817471157342012-10-18T21:31:00.002-07:002012-10-18T21:31:41.307-07:00<a href="http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/10/classical-music-youve-never-heard-before/">http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/10/classical-music-youve-never-heard-before/</a>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-21133369215431376042012-06-27T17:26:00.001-07:002012-06-27T17:26:48.598-07:00<a href="http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/06/chamberfest-cleveland-bursting-on-the-music-scene-with-a-bang/">http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/06/chamberfest-cleveland-bursting-on-the-music-scene-with-a-bang/</a>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-39814046463479151832012-06-20T20:15:00.000-07:002012-06-20T20:15:02.157-07:00<a href="http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/06/the-fresh-camp-hip-hop-improving-community/">http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/06/the-fresh-camp-hip-hop-improving-community/</a>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-64437801485292666982012-06-13T13:12:00.002-07:002012-06-13T13:12:26.098-07:00<a href="http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/06/dobamarama-come-support-refreshing-theater/">http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/06/dobamarama-come-support-refreshing-theater/</a>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-7045619742913683102012-05-16T14:36:00.001-07:002012-05-16T14:36:59.237-07:00<a href="http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/05/the-davenport-collective-a-friendly-musical-amoeba/">http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/05/the-davenport-collective-a-friendly-musical-amoeba/</a>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-24638281351246846582012-05-10T16:55:00.002-07:002012-05-10T16:55:32.007-07:00<a href="http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/05/for-the-love-of-latte-art-offers-thrills-of-coffee-culture/">http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/05/for-the-love-of-latte-art-offers-thrills-of-coffee-culture/</a>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-78940798835579566412012-04-29T11:28:00.000-07:002012-04-29T11:29:03.745-07:00<a href="http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/04/book-reviews-authors-explore-our-surprising-heritage/">http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/04/book-reviews-authors-explore-our-surprising-heritage/</a>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-67815157833873487852012-04-17T10:07:00.000-07:002012-04-17T10:07:08.529-07:00<a href="http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/04/artworking-speed-networking-for-artists/"><span style="font-size: large;">http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/04/artworking-speed-networking-for-artists/</span></a>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-6703781226254483722012-04-02T12:57:00.000-07:002012-04-02T12:57:33.337-07:00create/repeat<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">create</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">repeat</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">create</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">repeat</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">reate</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">crepeat</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">reate</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">creeat</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">reeat</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">creeat</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">repeat</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">create</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">repeat</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">create</span></div>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-48961834917038374282012-03-11T17:51:00.000-07:002012-03-11T17:51:57.688-07:00slipstreamslipstream lips<br />
ellipses elapse sing<br />
sleeps dreams<br />
reams reel loom <br />
loam moon<br />
meaning knight meandering<br />
me and<br />
ring<br />
inkIsaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-84534289343899326622012-03-05T14:31:00.000-08:002012-03-05T14:31:26.831-08:00Tree Hugger<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><i>[I wrote this story a few years ago. It still makes me chuckle.]</i> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span> </span>“Okay,” the MC addressed the restless audience, “next we’ll be hearing from George Le Monde, author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bark is Worse than the Bite: The Treachery of the Tree</i>.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A few people clapped. George Le Monde raised a big, stern finger.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Y’all are nice an’ tranquil now, but when the trees attack, then you’ll be sorry!” George exclaimed. “You’ll end up runnin’ for the hills—an’ you best hope there ain’t no trees out on that there hill!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“All right, now, George,” the MC interceded. “To start off, would you care to outline your Two-Step Tree Prevention Method for us?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Yessir,” George said, calming slightly with this appeal to his expertise. “Ya see, to stop a crocodile, you clamp down on its jaw. To stop a tiger, you shoot it between the eyes. To stop a tree—you hug it!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the audience, a man chuckled. George’s eyes went wide.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“To stop a tree, you hug it!” he yelped. “That’s the first step! The second step is, you run like hell before it can gitcha!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“That’s just fine,” said the MC, and stole a glance at his watch. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Four more minutes to go</i>, he thought, and sighed. “That’s how you stop a tree, now, is it?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“It is,” said George solemnly. “Some folks think that the best way to stop a tree is to cut it down—but that just makes the rest of ’em angry!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“You’re making <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">me </i>angry, mister!” a woman shouted. “Trees are people just like us!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Ma’am, if trees were people,” George said matter-of-factly, “then they would be psycho-murderers. An’ I think we got enough of those<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>around here, now, don’t we?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“You one of them?” shouted a man from the audience. He got a few laughs.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I ain’t!” howled George. “I’m tryin’ to save y’all from the trees!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The MC looked at his watch again, and asked, vaguely, “George, have you yourself ever had a bad experience with a tree?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>George nodded. “My brother Charley was killed by one of ’em, he was.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Startled, the MC looked back up at George. “He was?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>George nodded again. “It fell on him.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Did you push it?!” shouted the man from the audience. A few more laughs.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>George jumped out of his seat. The MC, concerned that his interviewee might hurt the man, jumped up, too, only to be knocked back down by a deafening crash. Pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling as an enormous tree ripped through the roof.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>George jabbed his meaty finger at the culprit. “It’s Leafy Red!” he shouted, spit flying from his mouth. “I been lookin’ fer ya! Ya killed my brother, and now you’ll pay!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The tree—a California Redwood—pitched forward with a demonic groan, but George was off the stage like a shot. He ran into the mass of screaming people and positioned himself directly under the trajectory of the tree. He thrust his hands upwards, and, before the tree could hit any bystanders, both of George’s massive arms were wrapped around its trunk in a gigantic hug.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Splat!</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I done hugged him to death,” moaned George from underneath the tree, “but Leafy Red, he took me down with ’im. Goodbye everybody. I’m glad I could prevent one more final catastrophe.” </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">And with that, he died.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The MC looked at his watch. He groaned softly to himself. How was he going to kill three more minutes?</div>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-21481285544095215922012-02-23T09:50:00.002-08:002012-02-23T09:50:32.346-08:00<a href="http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/02/growing-veggies-blowing-minds/">http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/02/growing-veggies-blowing-minds/</a><br />
<br />
No interview = brief article.Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-75562654686740789002012-01-27T07:57:00.001-08:002012-01-27T07:57:56.107-08:00<a href="http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/01/risk-ride-race-across-america-screening-of-bicycle-dreams-bdt/">http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/01/risk-ride-race-across-america-screening-of-bicycle-dreams-bdt/</a>Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8916641462043166955.post-491630761751199182012-01-11T14:35:00.001-08:002012-01-11T14:35:49.655-08:00<a href="http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/01/pretentious-tremont-artists/"><span style="font-size: large;">http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/01/pretentious-tremont-artists/</span></a><br />
<br />
Proposed headline: "Public Portraits: Life Drawing Sessions are Live in front of Audience"Isaachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16001106284956013424noreply@blogger.com0