| in america volume 23 part 1 - 2011 june-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Vancouver 2nd June 2011 The taxi driver who picked me up at 3663 Georgia was a young black man, Ethiopian maybe. Tom was seeing me off at the curb and the driver thought we were a fond old couple saying goodbye. How do I say this - maybe he was a man not long from a village - he felt our parting, as he imagined it, with us. He hesitated at the corner, crept forward, looking back, murmured "bye-bye". Then he flashed along Florida Drive which was blooming and lovely. We enjoyed it together. Yellow patches, silver willows. The Air Canada plane only had two seats on each side. I liked the look of the woman who sat down next to me. A young woman, a student? with a calm smooth face. We talked all the way. She told her story. Her father was a policeman in Seoul and she the third of five daughters. She was a student when a Korean man with American citizenship joined her church. Everyone knew he was in Korea on a temporary contract. She didn't think much of him. He was about thirty - old. After a year he made a move. He said he'd had his eye on her. He was persistent. When he had to go back to the US he said why didn't she marry him and come with him. She said she needed to finish her studies and she'd like to work for a couple of years before she married. He said he'd wait, but not that long. She could finish her studies in America. When he went back he phoned her every night. He called her mother, asked for support. Everyone was saying she should marry him sooner, so she did. I asked what were her first impressions of America. She said she didn't have any, because for her first two years she was miserable. When he was back in his own context he seemed to be less interested in her. She was lost and homesick. She missed her family. She very soon had a baby. She left him, flew back to Seoul five months pregnant carrying a one year old. While she was gone he read her diary. It wasn't what made all the difference but he phoned her after four months and said he'd do better, he understood more. "Did you miss him?" "Not at all, at first." She went back, finished her degree at Pomona College. When her daughter was two she went to work. She was a cashier at Macy's. It was her first job. Now she works for Samsung in logistics. Her son is 10, her daughter 8. She brought photos out of her wallet. They live in Carlsbad. There are 3 other Korean couples they get together with, kids the same age. She'd like to go camping but her husband doesn't want to. Her kids have made all the difference. She has her own money now. She hopes sometime she'll be able to travel. I told her about hitchhiking alone when I was 21, sleeping wherever I was, traveling without money, people feeding me. She was listening a bit agape, as if she needed to hear that sort of story. It is raining here. The maples are coming into soft lime-green leaf - chartreuse - against dark grey cloud in a pale but very white light. 4 A short muscular young man with glasses has come home with me - the house at the east place. He's coming into the bedroom and taking off his clothes. He's hard. "Nice" I say. Strangers have come into the kitchen. They must be overnight guests of my parents. They are snoopy Christians peering at me with the man. I hang a cloth over the cut-out in the wall, am trying to tack down the ends. He's waiting in bed. Etc. I saw that my parents were rolled up in their blankets asleep, grey things. Later we're outside. He goes up to three high school girls and is telling them something. He says he's a ju-jitsu expert, he saw them trying a move and he was explaining it. 5 Driving to Abbotsford through the year's perfect moment. Radiant long grass, meadows sheeted with buttercup. As I came into Abbotsford, Baker suddenly right there, huge and near, the always startling Valley god. My mom's rheumy eyes. Opa's were like that, pale blue red-rimmed desperate little eyes. On the way home I took the New Westminster exit and found David reading in the garden. He was wearing a good cotton shirt - the way he does, with sleeves rolled and collar up - clean bluejeans with a heavy leather belt and good Birkenstock sandals. I looked at his boy-shape with pleasure, a light long thing. We were sitting next to a stalk of dames rocket I could pull over and sniff. Next to it was a stalk of lunaria with the same flower. Dorothy got up from her nap and we took 3 chairs into the alley to sit in the last sun at 7 o'clock. When I drove away on the lower road next to the paper plant I saw long patches of white and purple dames rocket between the tracks. Stopped and brought a big bunch into the car. They are across the room next to the peaked cullet on the bench from 824. I wanted to smell them all night. 6 Zach's thesis jelled finally. I said if he now goes back to his graceful narratives Ant Bear will publish them. Val and Sue around Louie's carpet yesterday, talking about Wholphin, a DVD media magazine, that puts out issues with short films, PDFs. I could do that. Val's eyes are pale and show their whites around the iris so she seems to be staring. They are pin-point eyes and the moment she's bored with the talk they roam looking for good things to see in the room. She's willful and careful of her quality. Caffé Calabria on a Monday morning. Breeze through the window, Frank ageless behind the counter. Naked David in white plaster too short for the size of his head. Armless caryatid with a basket of fabric ivy on her head. Lowering Poseidon with fish tail wrapped across his genitals. Sun on the marble table, dazzling off the page. Okay, the mirror. What a lot of droop at the neck. Apart from that, alright. A bit severe, 66 years old. Small eyes. Good silver streaks. Good flat ears. Structure holding, not padded. Is it a sad look? Scrunched between the eyebrows. Anxious? Not exactly. Concentrated. Massive. That's alright. I'd like to be pretty but massive is true and pretty would happen momentarily if inspired. I'm whipping through business. Dentist, Video In, Rowen, film prints (not happening here), Mary, scanning, finishing students, book design consulting. 6 Rowen older and broke, consumed by fantasy - Louie mad at me because I'm realizing we shouldn't travel together this weekend - a sore throat - afternoon tired and eating, waiting for Row to get back, no knowing when it would be - the thought of taking on coaching him through the next semester - talking to Louie this morning she moralistic about how he's wasting his opportunities - the way when he came in this aft his shoulders were slumped again - both this morning and when I'd napped this aft intense black burn - in the bathroom mirror in strong side light seeing the deep creases in the skin of my cheek - aching in my palms, the skin of my face - twenty dollar bills vanishing remarkably - the shameful flatness of this writing - ears hissing all day. 7
So reluctant to get into student heads properly. - What it's like fighting with Louie - oddly helpless-feeling. I start out cold and strong, she fights back in her nasty way, I call that, then she says she won't be open any more, and then I'm frozen. Pain in my whole torso, speechless. This fight says something, that I wasn't attending. I bailed on a plan I went along with, I know that's bad. Why did I go along with it.
9 Was looking up a phone number for Budget, David emailed, offered to drive me. Bus - skytrain - Zero Avenue - Tabor Court - M's spot by the river - the ice cream parlour - Zero Avenue again - Vivo to pick up the video transfers - bus - train station - bus - now the Wilder Snail at 5 o'clock, looking across the street at the corner chestnut I've often mentioned. It's so fresh and whole, all its northern candles slanted east. - Booked into the Executive Hotel Pacific tomorrow night, train reservation tomorrow and Saturday, things to do tomorrow before about 3. Playing with David in the truck as he speeds like a teenager up the narrow asphalt ribbon of Zero Avenue. Arriving in the rusted little truck at the river and finding it flooded almost to the dyke. Mary gazing at the new greens everywhere, blackberry tips. Nootka roses up into the trees. A thick hedge of roses full of honey bees. Their scent from the dyke trail. David's light voice being nice to Mary everywhere. 11 Bit before Olympia - the gorse in heavy flower hanging in raggy clots. Bracken's sorted parallel geometry. It's mid-late morning, grey overcast. I love a meadow, an open field with even grass - that fine-stemmed light green silky-headed grass - in a frame of dense dark trees on the fenceline. These sleek flat dark green rivers one after another. The deliberate way the maples place their large leaves overlapped. There's no dames rocket down here! House for a meadow - concrete platform raised two feet, inset very wide shallow steps, narrow steel supports, narrow striped metal roof, rose-pink, dark red or rust-orange steel, broad flat river well below flood reach but visible. Sheltered hillside vegetable garden behind, gravel track, row of paeonies, row of wild roses. Horses but not in the meadow. Look at the willows hung with gold. Seahawk nests on pilings - they're ospreys he says. Firs drooping their bright new fingers. Here's the Columbia faceted like hammered pewter. We're just passing under the southbound lane of I-5. Are the clouds breaking up - there's sun for a moment. Little daisy heads floating in grass. Streaks of them. David used the word freshet - at the Fraser with Mary he said "Do you think it's high tide or is it in freshet?" California poppies along the tracks, Vancouver Washington. They get rain, they're taller and thicker. [page of house sketches] When I go downstairs to the washroom I pass through a bachelor party, 7 or 8 thick loud young men. I'm opening the door as one of them is saying "There's someone in there." Someone else says "You can shake it for him."
- Seeing down into little towns, well-kept small houses in their green neat yards as if ideal lives, peace and care. We're riding into bits of cottonwood fluff, celebratory. Doesn't Le Guin have a season called The Grass?
- At dinner a little Christian family. He talks about how many gallons of oil an individual uses in a lifetime, she's on Jenny Craig though she's skinny. This little river pale green where the west sun slants into it. A hazelnut orchard. Swaths of lupins amethyst-colored. We're climbing into cedars. This mountain-forest stretch bores me, I've been pasting heads and tails onto AG pages. A large white-tailed deer below looking over her shoulder. Snow on the blue heights. It's getting dark. Patch of snow next to the track. 12 I'm not miserable this trip, not minding that I don't have young pull. Wild oats foaming by the track. After Sacramento the tawny hillsides come into view in the west. California light - pale white light on the sides of California buildings. What I dreamed sleeping on the floor behind the last seat in car 1113. I was on the east place now owned by a rich man. I'd been living there and he was going to tell me to go? An arrogant man. I'm going to talk to him - this is mostly forgotten. I'm working to interest him. Saying I'm more attentive to business than I was. - San Luis Obispo station, coast live oaks dense and dark, fine-detailed, lifting and swaying all over. Cory and Kimberley; a half-Hispanic boy about to graduate from high school, ripe pimples, a hood up, very thick lips; a pretty elf of a girl, Rasta felt under a black ranchero hat, also half Mexican, other half Finnish, German, Irish, Iroquois. Smokes marijuana. (27, year and a half into her third marriage. First one beat her, stole guns.) Just graduated as an EMT, studies the Bible with the help of the Lord, cries about her mother's oppression, grilled me. Look at the Queen Anne's lace, swaths of it with chamise along the track. Eucalyptus litter. Fresh biscuit smell from my crotch on this 3rd day in the jeans. She was preaching and I was counterpreaching, which feels icky in retrospect. Mustard and Queen Anne's lace tossing together. - Here's the ocean. In a little sleep in my seat this morning I saw Tom walking toward me on the platform where I had just arrived. He looked just right. 13 When I lay down last night I saw yellow spots moving right to left. Sometimes small dots, mustard, sometimes larger and darker, the flower in coastal scrub as we rode over the sea after the flats of Salinas. In the Surfliner when I closed my eyes I was seeing almost contentless motion - just even flow without something flowing. When I was watching the flower dots I was sometimes also seeing dark shrub-shapes passing, passing. Dark still Monday at 8 o'clock. Got home at 1:30, didn't unpack, made a perfect cup of tea and looked at two days' email. Oh a shower. I traveled two days just to get back to my stuff! 14 I'm wondering why it has taken two sleeps to come to writing consciousness of the trip. For instance the relation of marijuana and felted hair - her dope speediness and abstraction and the image of network plaquing. And the pale old body across the aisle who never stopped talking, scrappy little thing, hard life over, next to a daughter who looked like her, same little narrow notched nose. I defended myself from her rather than studying her, the curly-haired New Zealand activist woman coming from a May Day celebration in Cuba and the fierce little Christian too. By the end of the two days I was despising human talk. I didn't like my own either, I was presenting, that inferiority of soul. The way I write here, now, is more confected. I don't run confidently, I ponder and erase. Energy. It's metabolic. I loved the trip though, the steady gentle flowing through always more world. On the far side of Klamath Falls, the livid three-quarters moon shifting continuously, hosts of tall pines hurrying past like an army we were meeting on the road. Behind them the livid afterglow. 15 Sabine Schneider's Gnostic figures - the front one with as if an interior light. What is it about them. I want them for the Orpheus film as they are against black. The seams around the head and shoulders are good, and the way the fabric stands on its ragged bottom edges. What makes them female, which I've assumed without considering. Their honey-wax color is correct, the color natural to unbleached cotton? They are 5'7. They would be in deep black lit from within, that strongly directional light as if the sun in outer space. The camera would circle them, wd very smoothly and slowly move in an incomplete arc around the head, gazing. - It's that they're the color of dried skin, so they are empty bodies. Why is that beautiful. I'm thinking of *'s video in London, the way the camera moved but the figures, obviously real, were frozen. Time outside of time. These figures are not dead, and they have a posture, which is one of inward gaze. Are they exiles? I don't think so. The drapery is classical, they are the drapery without the body. What did I learn about drapery in sculpture, that it diagrams energy flow. Contained around the head, rooted around the feet. Greco-Roman, some woman of Pompei? - with that sort of drape around her head. - Well rooted, continuous like bark on a tree. Structured around the head, seamed, fitted, but unsolid at the feet. A self portrait? Of authoritative modesty. Good bodies. - Discontinuous around the feet, meaning interwoven with the ground. 17 I'm milling again, in disorder about food, not caught up with students and avoiding them by reading J FIC novels two days in a row. Haven't touched either books or video. Bored with email. Waist tight on all my pants, unpleasant. Don't want to tell about going to the concert with Tom last night except that outside the Balboa Theatre with evening crowds arriving around us we stood listening to a marvel of a sax player, black man in his forties, legs like logs in shorts, who sets up a chair facing the escalators and draws out a perfect cut of line over play-along background music he's broadcasting from an iPod and a big rectangle of plywood-covered speaker. Had looked for Mary Stolz in the libe and came home with Pray love, remember, which was remarkable about a smart 17-year-old despising and loving her family, the despising not fudged but shown with its opposite. 18 Night of the hunter - silliest of acting - silliest of directing. When I read it [when I was about ten] what I felt was the evil man of god who was both religion and false father. They are floating downriver and pass a toad, a turtle, sheep. There's an owl, a rabbit. A fox barks. He sings Leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms. She countersings. She's not fooled. A dreadful sentimental postlogue that sez the little 'uns abide, sez it at least three times. The director is said to have hated the kids so he made Mitchum direct them. Most hideous little girl in the history of cinema. 20 I was kissing Robert MacLean, hungry biting little kisses. Earlier at a conference watching a striking woman, red lipstick and fingernails, wrestling on the floor with a beautiful man. She's saying "I'm 6'2." They've been friends but now she's after him. He's not sure. I call to him, "Your eyes are dilated." We're in corridors at a conference. I'm walking about smoking, thinking of the kinds of beautiful gesture of women smoking. - Why a movie with such hideous acting is a classic. People may not know why they revere it. It's strong visual gothic, there's that, but the strength is in the novel. Davis Grubb 1919-1980, published 1953, set in the '30s, West Virginia. Obviously the strength is archetypal, in the film much too heavy-handedly signaled. A stupid gullible little girl the little boy has to take care of. A stupid gullible mother fooled by the preacher man. Later a stupid gullible teenage girl. A fat stupid gullible older woman friend of the mother who pushes her into the marriage. Finally a sexless old woman who sees through the preacher man and shoots him but then has to utter pieties into the camera. A little boy given responsibility by his father. A derelict old man with a shack on the river who sees the murdered woman with her "second mouth" in a flivver underwater and then drinks himself into a stupor. Another useless older man. And the preacher, who hates women's sexual allure and believes himself instructed by god. We see him driving, we see him tall on a horse against the horizon. He's glamorous and in control. People will believe anything he wants them to. He's the figure of patriarchal religion unambiguously, who bamboozles the community, kills the sexual woman and hunts the children. The kids sleeping in the boat on the river, drifting. The completely wrong sunset moon rising jerkily into the dawn sky with moonlight on the floor of the barn thrown from a different source altogether. The preacher singing in the night patriarchy's allure, leaning on the everlasting arms. The kids hide in the cellar, the shamed murdered mother is hidden underwater. What I dimly remember of the book is a scene in the darkness of the cellar, they hiding and something about his hands. We had dark cellars that were holes in raw earth. So who's in this movie. The murdered woman and the stupid little girl are the director's blindness to human relation, that makes him direct actors so falsely. The preacher man is the director bamboozling his audience with a story of good and evil. The little boy is the remnant of the clarity that fails and faints in the end, confuses patriarchy with his own father and gives up the money. "It's too much." The old woman is the director's own old mother, whom he needs to see strong, but when the little boy has failed to hold onto what he has seen, reduces to pious lies. Is that it. I think so. The little boy gives the old mother an apple and she gives him a watch with a good loud tick. She's mother nature and she wins, it is she who endures but she is not allowed to speak true in the end. - News stories, two straight men caught blogging as lesbian women. Bridie who fears and despises men had fallen in love with one of them -. Stealing from women in a new guise. - Rhonda can't feed herself or write or pee anymore. She has had to leave her house, husband and little boy. I'm sorry I read what she wrote, though it says there's no harm. I don't like to feel anyone's death but my own. I don't want hers there when I get to mine - no it isn't that it's someone else's, it's that it's hers; I don't want hers, and I don't want to write her either. I did something for her when I could and that was the end, I won't subsidize more. I felt that when Laura was dying too - there has been what there has been. That's three students in ten years. Joan Maida, Rhonda Patzia, Laura Taylor. 21 Curtains - I hope they'll reflect mid-afternoon heat - if I'm going to be here in July I need them - and for the glare when I read on the couch - but they change the room though they're the same color as the wall. They soften it too much. The cream-colored light they throw sideways onto the wall is good though. They fidget. - By evening starting to get used to them. 22 G has been asking for a photo of my work setup so I took one this morning, blue slides up in FCP, blue workshirt on the back of the chair, cup of tea steaming. A poor effort at showing the FCP interface itself. Sent it with a note saying a screenshot wd've been better but I don't have a program for it. He sent back an url with a Mac command - shift command 4, draw a border and you hear a camera click. Grateful for his company. He noticed the blue shirt, he noticed the stainless steel cup, and not only that but he says his coffee cup is the same and he has a shirt like that - those so-intimate daily choices. - Then Jerry said he was happy for the soft grey day, children's voices singing in the street in summer, and the sight of my pristine workspace. Today's chapter was Soundtrack Pro and I've had to find the online manual, another 300 pages - My five weeks start next Monday but 10 evals to write, ugh. 23 Occurred to me today that I could do a workshop on POD publishing as a way to get myself back into it, so I'm designing that this morning. Will be able to show screen captures of templates! and Amazon pages, and anything else I need. Am at the French deli waiting for a ham and cheese baguette which I'm having in defiance, as I do these days - willful defiance of food discipline though I'm often sore. This is my most loved breakfast. I love the hard chewing and the touch of mustard and most of all the taste of bread. 24 Ybarra spoke in the soft quiet modulated voice of a man for whom sounds have meaning. Chandler Red wind 1938. -
25 Clean. Washed floor, washed bathroom rug and towels, bedding. Creamy light through the curtain at 6:30, Peter Green electric guitar, cup of tea, back to the publishing sheets. Saturday. 26 A man I'd slept with had died. I was sad and wondering whether I could go to his funeral, which would be in another place I might not be able to get to. He would be wanting to be buried in a basket in the ground - I saw the sort of basket it was clearly, as if a photograph. A long basket set into the ground shallowly, a cleanly cut rim of three inches of earth above it. His belongings buried with him. He was like Tony. I knew he had a wife and children. I walked into his room and looked at the sink. I was looking for the small pads he used to polish, but I saw and took something else, a four-tined fork one of whose tines was a small brush. [sketch] And so on. Earlier, photographs someone had taken of me, a young man. I hadn't seen them yet. Woke thinking that I have got passive because of the way I've developed of listening for impulse.
- Sunday mostly working except for steak at Denny's, NYT fast, and bike in the evening. Went through a lot of Lightning Source text and tonight got into the new InDesign version. Quite lost staring at it but then found a manual, 700 pages. Greg writes that he's got to Frank. I lit up hearing it. And he kidded me about saying Searle was a hideous toad, ie about being redundant. That kind of gentle kidding is familiarly him, fond. The curtained afternoons are lovely. If I open the window wide there's a breeze through the slot between its halves, heat reflects, and the room is dimly irradiated by broad lit strips held moving in the fabric. I can work on the couch without glare while the whole room steeps in gentle cream. I'm pleased finally to have thought what I needed and gone out and found it, and I'm still embarrassed when I see the curtains hanging there on either side of the window so completely taming the room. Meantime the pink lilies I bought in bud last Sunday more and more strongly filling the room with their candy scent. So big, so pink, so explosive in the way they open back. I'm ignoring the evals and jumping into my free five weeks. I'll establish my own doing and then fit them in. It has taken me almost 10 years to make this room clean and comfortable and a bit beautiful - isn't that odd? 28 Arguing with Greg about ethics and responsibility. What do I really think. He's old-style in his way of thinking - if someone kills another person in their sleep should they be held responsible, etc - that because I was saying a person is not the conscious self but the whole body, and responsibility goes with the whole body. We got into it because I said I was unethical about Reiner and he was making excuses for me. I was trying to explain why it seemed better with Tom to assume he was incapable. The little question I wasn't asking myself in his presence was whether I exaggerate my wickedness to get around feeling I've been a victim.
29 We drove away from Las Olindas through a series of little dank beach towns with shack-like houses built down on the sand close to the rumble of the surf and larger houses built back on the slopes behind. A yellow window shone here and there, but most of the houses were dark. A smell of kelp came in off the water and lay on the fog. The tires sang on the moist concrete of the boulevard. The world was a wet emptiness. - "Hold me close, you beast," she said. I put my arms around her loosely at first. Her hair had a harsh feeling against my face. I tightened my arms and lifted her up. I brought her face slowly up to my face. Her eyelids were flickering rapidly, like moth wings. I kissed her tightly and quickly. Then a long slow clinging kiss. Her lips opend under mine. Her body began to shake in my arms. - He reached for another of my cigarettes, placed it neatly between his lips and lit it with a match the way I do myself, missing twice with his thumbnail and then using his foot. He puffed evenly and stared at me level-eyed, a funny little hard guy I could have thrown from home plate to second base. A small man in a big man's world. There was something I liked about him. - The tumbling rain was solid white spray in the headlights. The windshield wiper could hardly keep the glass clear enough to see through. But not even the drenched darkness could hide the flawless lines of the orange trees wheeling away like endless spokes into the night. These are all Big sleep 1939. - The technical basis was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one that made good scenes. [One of his intros, 1950] 1888-1959 La Jolla, died at 70. Buried in Mount Hope. 30 "Did you trust Marriott?" Her face got a little hard. Her eyes a little watchful. "Not in some things. In others, yes. There are degrees." She had a nice way of talking, cool, half-cynical, and yet not hard-boiled. She rounded her words well. - Ways Chandler is Tom territory. A kind of wandering out into life's possibilities, which include getting beaten up and facing down anyone who's up for it, sexually too. Physically. It's quite a large sense of life. There's a lot of social range, all the kinds of oddities. Everyone sized up, both in terms of physical type and minute momentary state. The sense I have, with Greg reading the journal, of how much more of a traveler I've been, which is what makes journal the right medium overall. "She's a nice girl. Not my type." "You don't like them nice?" He had another cigarette going. The smoke was being fanned away from his face by his hand. "I like smooth shiny girls, hard-boiled and loaded with sin." I laughed with pleasure there. The guys I've liked. Diana [Kemble] said I was a flâneur. Tom is too. What it means is the self I sometimes glimpse, who takes suffering as news of the world. What else is there beside the flâneur. Did there use to be somebody who didn't want anyone to get hurt? I'm more casual about hurt now. Harmed is different. In Marlowe's world people get dead but they don't get harmed - he sees them at the ends of many kinds of harming but he himself comes through his binges and bruisings better in the morning and so does anyone else we meet. No one loses capacity. What I've said about my mom's intelligence about spirit harm. But do we know enough about how harm happens to understand the distinction well enough to make it important. This week I've been relearning InDesign, it has been a year and I only remember this and that. Today my reserved copy of Sound editing in Final Cut Studio. Files loading off the disk. Am aware I'm not learning efficiently. Haven't developed a system. Flash cards? Friday 1st July There I went out at 7:30 into the gloaming on my bike, bought 3 stacks of colored half-size file cards at Rite-Aide, got to Ace Hardware just as it was closing and came out with a 3.5 to one quarter adapter for the headphone jack. Rode home in the dark. Plugged in the headphones and listened to the Borrego files. Then sat 'til midnight writing FCP commands on green and blue flashcards. InDesign will be on pink. 3 Yesterday I tried a high pass filter on the bird in 1026 and watched spectrum window strip out the bottom half of both channels. That was a beginning. Set to learning Soundtrack Pro 3 by my method of copying the manual into Word and zipping through deleting and highlighting. Stephen Greenblatt 2004 Will of the world Norton Latin drills, analysis, imitation, rhetoric. Latin plays with disobedient children and sly servants, the parasites, tricksters, whores and foolish fathers, the feverish pursuit of sex and money. physical emblems of this inner life, such as the withered arm and hunchback that mark the crookedness of Richard III. pagan festivals that shape the sense of the year mummers' plays in which the madman fights with a 'wild worm' Midlands folk customs He had deep roots in the country ... He simply took them with him to London. The fantasy was of a world of magical beauty, shot through with hidden forces and producing a free-floating, intense erotic energy in which all creatures ... - Watching the playhead slice through Space hotel's first track in frequency spectrum view enthralled to see the music like and much more than and in other ways less than how I seem to see-feel its spatiality. I stared with nothing to say but full of intimation. The right kind of magic. I want to know the meaning of those large rosettes dissolved in open sky. How is that done. Other marks are directly transcribed drawings, the little base ticks like rule markings that are tabla pats, the standing spears that are bigger drums, the strong parallel streaks that are sitar notes seen bending, the thicker posts with a forward-dissolved edge that are snare swats, places where there are squares of grid, long, dissolved humps of drone, quite a lot of R-L difference, quite a lot of open space, clean. It begins as visible music and as actually visible is exquisite. - I know my ears are crude, I gape at that beauty knowing other people can look at it understanding what I don't. I've been quite avid learning Soundtrack, which is easier, and takes me where I haven't been. 4 It's the 4th, and quiet in the neighbourhood under diffused sun. Greece, the Renaissance, the Romantics, the Early Moderns. lifelong interest in property investments nobility, not of blood alone but of character - has an affinity with excess ascends me to the brain, dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapours which environ it, makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes. The drunkenness that in both cases seems linked to gaiety, improvisational wit, and noble recklessness is unnervingly disclosed at the same time to be part of a strategy of cunning calculation, and ruthless exploitation of others. ability to absorb vocabulary ... transformation of technical terms into the intimate registers of thoughts and feelings. calibrated gestures of respect ... bowing, kneeling, doffing of hats, cringing ... treatment by government officials and by the courts was drastically different. By royal proclamation, silks and satins restricted to the gentry. Players were vagabonds. such a consciousness of social shame - the sense of what it means to go up and down, making oneself a motley to the view Restoration as a theme. Now he's deeply in / Look how imagination blows him His fascination with a particular set of stories - his sense that these might work and, still more, that he might have it in him to work with them. Shakespeare's characters repeatedly having to lay claim to a gentility that is no longer immediately apparent, all of its conventional signs having been swept away. - A couple of STP chapters and then going through Space hotel's first track marking it. My idea is to find out how to set an audio track to edit to - like a click track - does it have a click track? Visual click track. Learn from SH's spatial/textural sound. 5 Letter from OAS finally, offering me 39/40th of a full pension, which by the end of July would be $8300 into savings. Tonight brought slides into FCP over Space hotel and learned zooms and pans properly. Also text generation ending with bridge shadow superimposed over other blue images, quite lovely. More of that tomorrow. I learned enough last week so I'm not lost, can use the books accurately to figure out how to do something. Meantime G has got to Frank visiting at Christmas and wrote with questions, as he does. His generosity is putting a floor under these days. I marvel at it. Meantime the scarlet begonia with its black leaves is splendid at the window, sometimes with the lit white curtain behind it. Hot afternoons. My face stings maybe with salt. The better questions are outside my range at the moment. I mean questions of what's worth making - and I notice that - but want to know this tool well, this time. It makes the things that used to be hard, for instance for Brakhage, so easy that I'll have to find deeper standards if I can. Doing laundry today, happened to buy the LA Times. Music critic writing about Eno's new work with voices. Spoken beat, Randall Roberts LAT Calendar July 5 2011 16-track Drums between the bells You start to develop musical value and musical weight, and you start to notice how this word falls on that beat. musical structures that support, reinforce, play tricks with, encapsulate and interpret work propelled by advancing technology every syllable and glottal stop a tone We are right at the beginning of a digital revolution in what can be done with recorded voices ... stretched, squeezed, harmonized, repositioned, inverted ... a musical material I just went in and started moving notes, so that quite a few of them fell on her words. And I thought that was a lovely effect when the music and the voice occasionally kind of rung together. 6 poets, as they were then called late sixteenth century London The group shared a combination of extreme marginality and arrogant snobbishness. the son of a London salt merchant blank verse ... the dynamic flow of unrhymed five-stress, ten-syllable lines ... its subtle rhythms phantastical interluding ... playwriting few signs of the influence of Spenser, Donne, Bacon, or Ralegh ... the living writers who meant the most to him were those he encountered in the seedy inns near the theatres to write steadily for more than two decades to retire to that town in his late forties With Green, Watson and Marlowe all dead, Shakespeare, not yet thirty years old, had no serious rivals. "There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers" Green said. excellence in the quality he professes the public flyting
experimental participation and self-protective distance took what he could from Green ... also performed an act of imaginative generosity ... Shakespeare's generosity was aesthetic What have I learned today - how to set a blink as a metronome - next a long sequence and use Effects > Video > Blink to set beats on the frame. Color correction tools. Frame View. Filters, mattes and keys. Shape and border filters used together to make a little traveling frame. With a walk to mail the OAS doc and eat at the Brown Bagger. Bike now. Notley on trance - a voice that answers when she asks. 7 Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee / Calls back the lovely April of her prime. sweet, witty soul of Ovid so I, made lame 8 Richard Ford story last night. I was sleepy and hurrying through it, bored by the scenes in Maine - bored by any East Coast landscape - but the woman's situation as he was describing it, as she felt it, caught something I know and haven't said about the way I was with Tom toward the end. The way she keeps assessing whether he's really handsome, the way he keeps saying he wants to be with her while his decisions are moving him toward having left. Tom wasn't, after all, trying to improve life for her, no matter what he thought. Only his. ... for a moment she wanted to speak to Tom, to wake him, to tell him that something or other would be alright .... But she didn't and knew only that the time for saying so many things was over. [Charity in A multitude of sins 2001 Vintage] - Jews in England expelled in 1290, popularly thought villainous and at the same time every Sunday "functioned as the source of the most exalted spiritual poetry in the English language." - What I notice there is that hatred for the father-rulership in Christianity is encapsulated in the figure of the Jew. "Tokens of all that was heartless, vicious, rapacious and unnatural." Luther "called upon Christians to burn Jews." 9 1564-1616, in London from 1586-1611? creation of strategic opacity released an energy ... poetic coherence ... inner structure technical
provide the fascination desired and complicated that fascination [Devils] provoke and shape fantasies by direct corporeal intervention stirring up and exciting the inner perceptions. lived above a French wig-maker's shop on the corner of Mugwell and Silver Streets in Cripplegate, at the northwest corner of the city walls.
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