Bruegel the Elder, The Battle about Money

Running in Church

Then, you were a hot-thinking, thin-lidded tinderbox,
Losing your balance meant nothing at all. You would
pour through the aisles in the highest cathedrals,
careening deftly as patriarchs brooded.

You made the long corridors ring, tintinnabular
echoes exploring the pounded cold floor,
forcing the walls to the truth of your progress:
there was a person in this church's core.

Past thick stained-glass colors wafted and swirling
in pooled interludes that swung down from the rafters,
cinnabar wounds threw light on your face, where the
pliant young bones were dissolving in laughter.

-from Eve (1997) by Annie Finch
via a private poetry mailing list I am on.

This afternoon I was following around the drummers from Loco Bloco as they strolled through the Mission. The destination was 23rd St. where a neighborhood celebration of Cinco de Mayo was in full swing. These are also the days leading up to San Francisco's Carnaval.

Carnaval here is a full parade surrounded by a loose set of smaller celebrations around the city. It still is the form of a spectacle instead of the immersive sense of Carnival. The latter is not just for spectators but is instead a suspended time in which the participants become actors and the rules of social order are disfigured or suspended. Burning Man may be one of Carnivals truer modern descendants.

The grand theorist of the Carnivalesque is Mikhail Bakhtin. In Rabelais and his world he develops the fullest conception of the carnivalesque, the beautiful and the grotesque:

"In fact, carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators.... Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world's revival and renewal, in which all take part. Such is the essence of carnival, vividly felt by all its participants.... The tradition of the Saturnalias remained unbroken and alive in the medieval carnival, which expressed this universal renewal"

Fortunato Depero, Automata, 1945

I hunger for your mouth, your voice, your hair
and I prowl the streets, starving and silent,
bread does not nourish me, the dawn upsets me,
I hunt for the liquid sound of your feet all day.

I am hungry for your sleek laugh,
for your hands the color of a savage harvest,
I hunger for the pale stone of your nails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the burnt sunbeams of your beauty,
the stately nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shadow of your lashes

and hungering, I come and go, sniffing the dusk
looking for you, for your hot heart
like a puma in the solitude of Quitratue.

As a followup to an earlier post, I discovered this new web translation of Neruda's 100 Love Sonnets. I too had noticed the rough phrase "Rough Warehouses that growled: get lost." The question is whether it is apt or it is impertinent. This is a peek at the subtleties of the art of translation.

Archigram's Kunsthaus Graz

Underground San Francisco part 8: A woman in the Mission district projects 16mm films out of her window and onto a nearby wall. People stop and watch. Apparently the films were all silent but now she uses a baby monitor which she drops into the street so that people can hear. Its called The Electric Mural Project.

There is no formal calendar but tomorrow night (Friday) at 8pm they are showing old spanish educational films including Airplane trip to Mexico(1952) and La Cuidad de Mexico(1960).

My friend Anna has been doing some amazing things in the Renewable Energy space. She just organized this Kerry fundraiser here in San Francisco which I am posting here. Email me if you want more info. Its a minimum of $100 a person:

Greetings,

I am emailing to invite you to a CleanTech fundraiser for John Kerry on
April 28th. Hosted at the Fairmont in conjunction with the CleanTech
Venture Forum, its a great opportunity to come meet some wonderful Bay Area
investors, entrepreneurs, and technologists in the renewable energy and
clean technology space AND help John Kerry win back the White House!

Hosted by Andrew Beebe, CEO - Energy Innovations, Greg Gretsch, Managing
Director - Sigma Partners, Randall Hayes, Rainforest Action, Peter Liu,
Principal - LM Investment, Thomas Layton, Eric Macris, Sunil Paul, Founder
of Brightmail and Angel Investor, Barney Pell, Martin Roscheisen, CEO - Nano
Solar, Joel Serface, Venture Manager - Eastman Ventures, Sanjay Wagle,
Principal - Expansion Capital Partners, and me!

More details to follow.

Best regards and many thanks,

Anna

"Take a twenty-four hour trip through the mind of Beethoven. Join us for a once-in-a-lifetime all-night pajamas-please sleep-over concert-event at 964 Natoma."

Did the ancients think that the stars were campfires burning in the sky?

Lately it is as if i were traversing a large dark field speckled with campfires. Each fire holds a small group of people who invite me to drink hot tea, to warm my body and listen to their stories. I introduce myself and listen closely. This metaphor has strength for me.

I remember walking on dark beaches in San Diego, beaches illuminated only by a string of campfires. Walking by the cold tides, our bare feet bouncing on the wet sand, we would walk from one to the next. As we approached each one, what seemed like dark stirrings took on a human face. A small band of people would emerge, mumblings became words, became conversations and each fire became an island. As we walked away, the warm chatter would again get washed out by the sounds of the ocean and we'd be again stumbling in the darkness, guiding ourselves by the light of the approaching flames.

The path is dark and uncertain and so it is natural that we create communities to huddle with, to exchange dreams.

The other day I lay in Dolores park with M. and her roommate, our bellies exposed to the sun. The day was warm and so we were surrounded by couples and groups on their blankets. I shared stories of things I had recently heard and seen. M. laughed as we agreed that you do not need to visit foreign cities to get a taste of the culturally strange.

From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream, they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.

This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again. The city's streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten.

New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something from the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of arcades and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape.

The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.

Cities and Desires (Calvino)

Maps from Tangential University via invertebra

I was trying to describe to someone the level of graffiti I saw when I was in East Berlin. I looked around and stumbled upon this great site Urban Haute Couture which collects photos of street art from Berlin and Amsterdam and Hamburg. Their Bucharest section also includes stencils which can be found at the Romanian Stencil Archive.

Two literary puzzles I haven't been able to solve:

1. In Nabokov's "Speak, Memory" he writes "We subjected [Uncle Ruka] to a test one day, and in a twinkle he turned the sequence '5.13 24.11 13.16 9.13.5 5.13 24.11' into the opening words of a famous monologue in Shakespeare." The monologue is 'To be or not to be' from Hamlet but the question is whether this was an arbitrary substitution cipher.

Oddly, the first few letters follow the pattern of a rotational cypher where the next letter is x fixed places from the previous (e.g. O(13)=T-5. B(24)=O+13.) but that pattern collapses quickly. It may just be random but I cant get it out of my mind.

2. Borges, in his short-story The Rose of Paracelsus introduces the name Johannes Grisebach out of nowhere! Who is Grisebach? There was an Eduard Grisebach, a poet and the editor of the works of Schopenhauer who was known to Borges.

I liked so much the way she would suddenly sit down on a wall, or a broken pillar in that shattered backyard to Pompey's pillar, and be plunged in an inextinguishable sorrow at some idea whose impact had only just made itself felt in her mind.

"You really believe so?" she would say with such sorrow that one was touched and amused at the same time. "And why do you smile? You always smile at the most serious things. Ah! surely you should be sad?" If she ever knew me at all she must later have discovered that for those of us who feel deeply and who are at all conscious of the inextricable tangle of human thought there is only one response to be made - ironic tenderness and silence.

In a night so brilliant with stars where the glow-worms in the shrill dry grass gave back their ghostly mauve lambence to the sky there was nothing else to do but sit by her side, stroking that dark head of beautiful hair and saying nothing.

Underneath, like a dark river, the noble quotation which Balthazar had taken as text and which he read in a voice which trembled with emotion and partly with the fatigue of so much abstract thought: "The day of the corpora is the night for the spiritus. When the bodies cease their labour the spirits in man begin their work. The waking of the body is the sleep of the spirit and the spirit's sleep a waking for the body"

-From Durrell's Justine

I like the energy that Florian captures in his photos. Flo is a friend of Mina's who stayed with her last week.

The week before that was Mina's 29th Birthday!! Happy belated birthday Mina. You only seem to grow younger like you've built your own secret time machine.

What I like about Mina's own photographs are their sense of assurance. She has an accomplished eye. I don't know why I like these two harbor pictures so much, but I do.

On the subject of birthdays, my friend Paul is celebrating his birthday this week in Paris. By some strange conjunction of events, the kind of stuff usually associated with planetary alignments, it looks like I might be in Paris in a few days to join him. This is good. I'd like to finally meet his friend Jenn (below with paul), who was a news anchor for Hong Kong TV, as well as Paul's sister Elizabeth, who is in the world of Paris couture, and whom I have always admired from afar.

The Latin Jungle
La Selva Latinoamericana

In Venezuela it was the writer Romulo Gallegos who in 1929 penned perhaps one of the first indigenous novels, Dona Barbara. Here, the natural world arises as a powerful protagonist. The Latin American novel seems to first take form as a drama in which the European man is soaked in the wild, savage psychology of the native world.

A better novel still is Gallegos' Canaima in which the landscape itself defines the course of the novel. Canaima is about one man's futile struggle against the forces of nature, and by implication - destiny. I wanted to quote from Canaima but after looking around for days, even through old boxes of books, I am giving up. The climactic chapter has the protagonist caught in the jungle far from home as a violent storm approaches. He decides to tear his clothes off to confront the storm head on, hugs the largest nearby tree and confronts the elements - wind, rain, lightning, earth - one by one as a series of heroic trials.

Miguel Angel Asturias Men of Maize, however, was the first to combine the European form with the magical, dream-like narratives of native folktales to create what is known today as 'magical realism' (Asturias even won the Nobel prize and yet is still fairly unknown) Men of Maize is so deeply imbedded in Native culture it is an adaptation of the Maya's Popol Vuh. It is difficult to read if you do not know what it references. But it is beautiful, hallucinatory writing with the rhythm and unexpectedness of a large prose poem. A sample:

The word of the earth turned to flame by the sun almost set fire to the maize-leaf ears of the yellow rabbits...but Gaspar was once again becoming earth that falls from where the earth falls, which is to say, sleep that finds no shade in which to dream in the soil of Ilom, and the solar flame of the voice could do nothing, tricked by the yellow rabbits that set to suckling in a papaya grove, turned into forest papayas, that planted themselves in the sky, turned to stars, and faded into the water like reflections with ears.

Asturias' contemporary is the much more readable Alejo Carpentier. His book The Lost Steps is in many ways a very modern piece of fiction which reads like an adventure story. An ethno-musicologist from New York City flees into the jungle in search of ancient music. But the jungle, of course, not only transforms him but also twists the storyline, imposing its own ancient sense of time and narrative as the protagonist wanders farther and farther away from his modern reality. The Lost steps is one of those books which I at first read quickly, only to realize later how much I had missed.

The last pearl in this string is Alvaro Mutis' The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. Garcia Marquez admires Mutis fiercely. Mutis is Joseph Conrad mixed with Garcia Marquez yet, like any original writer, comparisons are unfair. Maqroll is the individual, the thinking man who, forged from the jungle, can now embody it and make it his own. Maqroll is a fearless voyager, a philosopher with odd observations and aphorisms, an observer unbound by his environment. He has no home but the world is his home. Mutis' writing is so immediate, so real, that I want to re-read it even as I am reading it.

A caravan doesnt symbolize or represent anything. Our mistake is to think that its going somewhere, leaving somewhere. The caravan exhausts its meaning by merely moving from place to place. The animals in the caravan know this, but the camel drivers don't. It will always be this way.

And,

A woman's body under the rush of a mountain waterfall, her brief cries of surprise and joy, the movement of her limbs in the rapid foam that carries red coffee berries, sugarcane pulp, insects struggling to escape the current: this is the exemplary happiness that surely never comes again.

Both from Mutis' The Snow of the Admiral

I.
Simultaneously, moments in life are disconnnected episodes and also part of a larger narrative. In the first case, moments of peace and sleep are dividers which separate self-contained events, oases of experience which are presented to us much as a cinematic moment. In the latter case, experience is an elaborate but not incongruos story which unwinds erratically, as if told by a stuttering and distracted storyteller.

II.
We all have the hands of a sculptor. Events unfold that have that sense of both accident and providence, like a meteoric collision. We catch them and shape them into something we can understand, coloring them with our own private set of pigments.

III.
This morning the sun was too bright and so I squinted like a beast who had emerged from a cave, holding my black coffee with both hands as if it were a precious stone.

This will be a reminder to myself to attend the Isabel Samaras shows later this month here in San Francisco. The pop-culture-meets-Art thing is difficult to pull off well.

My friend Thomas in college believed strongly in the circular theory of Aesthetics. That is, if something is terrible it has the potential to be magnificently terrible. Anybody can create art that is uninspired but to able to create something truly monstrous takes talent and inspiration. And so the truly bad is also the truly great.

He used to search for music and art that was so bad it was sublime. He'd play old homegrown records he dug up in garage sales, home-recorded stuff say of someone singing in the high-pitched voice of a child, strange symphonies that sounded like a huge catfight, all in search of that magnificently terrible.

I still think of Thomas when I see a lot of pop art these days. I like the work of Samaras because she doesn't take herself too seriously. She can unite Botticelli's Venus and Gilligan's Island in a way that is both funny and new. She's also done a lot of illustrations and the one above is one she did for Bitch magazine.



A while back I posted about the New Yorker covers done by Eric Drooker. The cover above is another one by him titled X-Ray Manhattan. That cover and many others will be showing here in San Francisco starting this week. There's a special opening for the show this Thursday which I have an invitation for and I'd like to attend but I probably won't be able to.

If any of the files on the playlist have ever intrigued you, now is the time to pull them down. That server will be disappearing in a few days and it is doubtful that I will rebuild it somewhere else.

The cat Dinofelis, known as a false saber-tooth, was a specialized hunter of hominids. It seems to have enjoyed eating baboons and most likely, early humans.

The paleontologist C.K. Brain, in his book Hunter or the Hunted?, suggests that early man was more often prey than predators. Our move to predator status was a modern thing. We constructed fire and weapons and reversed an old power structure.

The writer Bruce Chatwin, a fascinating figure of his own, was drawn to Brain's theories. For Chatwin, Brain had discovered the ultimate fabled beast that lurks in our imaginations. Nicholas Shakespeare, in his biography of Chatwin, writes:

For two days Bruce engaged Brain in conversations which he described as "the most stimulating discussions in my life"... If the leopard-like cat had preyed on our ancestors, then man in his origins was not necessarily aggressive. He lived his life in fear, dinofelis watching him from the shadows.

Bruce--who called the cat "the Prince of Darkness"--amused the older man. Brain says, "He understood 'the Prince of Darkness' as a psychological necessity. He thought we had lived so long with prowling nocturnal predators they had become part of our make-up. When we no longer had these animals in bodily form, we invented dragons and heroes who went off to fight them." Discussing, for instance, Uccello's painting of St. George in the act of lancing the dragon, Bruce seemed to think this was an illustration of what had actually happened.

Brain had misgivings about this nostalgia for "the Beast we have lost". Nevertheless, it excited him to watch Bruce take his work and run with it. "Chatwin was like a nineteenth-century synthesiser," says Brain. "There is a place again for that kind of generalist, someone who can wander among specialised fields and pull things together. Otherwise it's very compartmentalised and syntheses don't really occur." The two men talked late into the night and on the following day they drove to the cave at Swartkrans.

Swartkrans is where Brain discovered the earliest use of fire by man. It is thus, in Brain's account, the epic place where the battle was turned.