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EARTHQUAKE, CALIFORNIA (1.7.2010)
The small or far-off earthquakes come on like windwaves at a dock on the lake… the shake is more of a numb drumming at the heel, a vibration felt first in the cobweb wheels of awareness & noted only in the melodies of reflection.
Go Anyway
I’d already survived the arc of the large jetliner we took from San Francisco to Minneapolis for the holidays when my father offered to take Matea & me up into the dreamclouds above my hometown in the small propeller plane he pilots for a living. It’s no secret that I hate flying. No, that’s not quite right. I enjoy flying, but I suffer… my brain explodes in cascading thoughts of flimsy air pressure, vast spaces of sky & the complete loss of control. Furthermore, a distaste for cannonballing through the day in a mechanical cigar w/pasted butterfly wings seems utterly rational to me. But! I went anyway. “Go anyway” - that’s my advice on this life.
So while mother earth batted her breath at us some thousand feet above the frozen lakes & forests of Minnesota, my father handed the controls over to Matea (I was stuffed into the backseat, by the way, like a dirty handkerchief in the pocket). Lucky for us, Matea is a natural-born pilot. She has only an expired drivers license back on the ground, but she can push a small plane through a turn while my father (a natural-born professional pilot) points out tree plantations & flood zones. I was shaking in my shoes when taking this photograph.
El Poeta
Saturday I had the good fortune to find myself in a cozy Victorian w/the great Cuban poet & novelist Pablo Armando Fernández. He was giving a private reading in a beautiful home in the hills above Haight-Ashbury at the behest of filmmaker Saul Landau, to which I was very lucky to be invited.
The party gathered around a table of hors d’oeuvres & wine, w/the dozen or so guests mingling about in conversation… everyone seemed to know everyone else, except for me. This was a wonderful fact because it meant I got to meet many accomplished & amazing people - an artist, a doctor, a journalist, a filmmaker &, of course, El Poeta. Even the children (largely my age or younger) of these people seemed to be doing notable things. It was humbling.
The centerpiece of the evening was a reading by the 80-year-old Cuban writer. Though he could speak English fairly well, he read his work in Spanish &, after the music of his voice subsided, Saul would stand & read the English translations. El Poeta told many beautiful stories, mostly about love & family, & won over the hearts of the gathered.
What a remarkable man he was, all white-haired & lion-faced. This man, who was exiled from Cuba before the Revolution & counts Castro among his friends. This man, who knew Neruda & hosted Ginsberg & Ferlinghetti in Havana. This man, who asked about my wife & advised about my life &, when evening came, took my hand & said “Good luck, my child.”
12.12.09 - notes
When I hear the evening church bells, I slip into a pea coat & nice shoes, twist an umbrella around my wrist. Outside there are yellow-green leaves on the sidewalk.
In Chinatown the trinkets reflect headlights from the rain. Buses pass w/nondescript faces, libraries of graffiti & other advertisements. I try to read them all, walking.
Later, as my train leaves the station, this California reminds me of Italy for a moment. But only because I let a memory run over the world. These two are not so much alike.
A young woman behind me makes ambitious plans for Valentine’s Day 2010 - a hotel room in Pacifica, ocean view. The peninsula is off-black & spotted w/porch lights.
My station is covered in raindrops. The restaurant is top-shelf, small & inviting. My wife is there, w/her coworkers. I order wine. We eat like royalty on another’s dime.
Southern food. Layers of courses, tiny portions. Interludes of rosemary cornbread, lemon sorbet & Bananas Foster. I trade off taking sips of 11 pm coffee & cabernet.
Idiot Wind (New York City Sessions 1974)
Unreleased Blood on the Tracks Take
Apart from the opening lines*, this early version of Idiot Wind strikes me as the genuine sound of adulthood - suspicious of victories, hesitant at happiness, harshest on the nearest & dearest. You know? Or do you know?
Youth is an unsustainable state of certainty. Mine was. This is not an admonishment. Youth is such a state. Growing up is to realize your own idiocy, & still be unable to overcome it. That’s the catch. It’s easy to pass each clue as if it were another block in the road between you & the finish line… when young. Later you learn the road is a cement sea & there are finish lines all around you, wherever you choose to sleep. You realize you’re already tangled in the tape of a thousand finishes & suddenly it’s not so easy to understand where this whole crazy thing is headed.
Dylan sheds his attitude in this version - a confessional, really. It’s hard to tell the difference between his insults & his pleas. Are they different? Maybe it was too uncomfortable, as history knows this song from a very different angle. The released version was re-recorded in Minneapolis w/modified lyrics & a backing band. The confessional becomes a blazing insult. Simpler & more sure of itself. A powerful front. A fake.
I miss certainty. I’ll tell you all a secret: I would love to tear someone apart again… just hang an insult in the air & walk away w/a clean mind. Next steps. A clean mind gets harder as time wears on. You lose your notion of “the good guy” in an objective sense but you never lose the need to feel vindicated. So every ill word you speak becomes a double-edged sword that cuts you up just as much. To win is to be left alone w/your unending parade of thoughts, which is no kind of trophy.
Despite this, & maybe in spite of this, happiness does exist. Happiness exists in abundance. Progress exists. Kindness. Love. Somehow these all exists. & it makes you dizzy w/wonder. This is the sound of adulthood. I’m just writing it down here for a day’s worth of progress.
* The first verse is a somewhat not-relatable tirade against the media, however, I’ve always thought this bit was among Dylan’s finest stories:
They say I shot a man named Grey / & took his wife to Italy
She inherited a million bucks / & when she died it came to me
I can’t help it if I’m lucky…
After returning home full & happy Thanksgiving night, I went bumbling down the streets in search of toothpaste. What a day to run empty of such a thing: 24-hour groceries closed, corner stores closed, everywhere I went dark & shuttered. But above me all along the way, four or five stories in each direction, the windows were lit up w/faces, clanking tableware, & the unmistakable song of laughter. But there were no open doors or open signs on the ground floor until Chinatown appeared, neon & swampy, from the relentless zigzag progress of my walking. I bought a small tube from a tiny store that seemed to sell everything, & then turned back up the hill. Just as I emerged at the point of the climb where Chinatown’s orange glow disappears into the streets below (sort of like lava in an underground flow), I encountered a solitary bubble floating near an intersection on Mason Street. There were no obvious sources, no passing cars or sorcerers. The magic bubble was bumbling about in the wind much like I was, so we cast our lot together for awhile. Did I feel strange following a bubble across deserted streets & sidewalks? Maybe. It didn’t really occur to me until later, when the bubble had popped & I was left again w/my thoughts & a small tube of toothpaste. I stood in that place for a few minutes. I wasn’t in a hurry - Alcatraz looked epic from there & it was a short walk home.
…
I have crossed the same acre, in mud or spice, a thousand times for a thousand nights of rest. A dangling forest of windows above, tangled in their messes. But I am a bitter on the endless gray floor - a temper not seen since Nero watched the last of the silphium wither.
Yes, there is concrete. There are bones. & there are oases in these deserts…
Atlas in his Youth
You are walking along a beach by the ocean, singing a song voiced perfectly in your head & in your heart but your sunburnt lips aren’t moving. The light sparkles like gunpowder on November waves, & you cannot touch them at all. You try. Try again. You tried.
See these people? Holding hands, opening bags, flying kites, kissing eyes. They are not your friends. They are your parents, & your grandparents, & parents so far removed you’d share a cigarette on the cold fat rock by the pier. They have a place, not here.
Someone will see you, all lit up, eternal & faceless, but not w/out your graces. & you will stand in place until the sand buries your feet together, roots for branches. When you are thirsty, you will open your mouth to the sky like the very first time, every time.
But for now you are walking. The boats are drowning. & somewhere a baby is born.
This night, this room is a lighthouse. This night is a sea. Thick as ink. Menacing.
No code, a steady fleet of dreams. No code to read. A steady light. A beam.
All lives arrive in a world of new things, hungry stares, happy secret daydreams.
Then some twenty years on come father’s bloodthings
& the worms of your mother.
We send entire summers off to slumber. We eat them, one full fist of thunder. We do.
We write our names on placemats, on paper, on any reachable surface of the earth.
I write my name like I chose it, myself, one dumb morning before birth.
Joshua, the open-ended answer.
Joshua, the unshakable candor, please tell me how to proceed through an hour…
- Nightly Nonsense, September, 2 thousand 9
“Goodmorning. The elevator’s fixed.”
“Is it? Great.” I push the button. My hair is out of control. “How many have taken it?”
“Excuse me?”
“The elevator. How many people have already taken it?”
“The guy just left not three minutes ago.”
I’m holding a thermos of coffee & a blueberry poptart. “The elevator fixer guy?”
“Yeah, he just left. You’ll be the first person to try it!”
The elevator door pings. ”No, I don’t like those odds. I’m taking the stairs.”
Mark Matienzo, an applications developer in the Digital Experience Group of the New York Public Library, cited my Reaching for the Out of Reach project as one of three “positive examples to illustrate the benefit of [creative] reuse” with regard to digital archives during his talk at the Society of American Archivists meeting in Austin, Texas, on August 13, 2009:
Yet, for all the fear, uncertainty and doubt … there are people that you might think of as shadowy figures that disrespect your boundaries who really may be doing a positive service to your institutions and collections by adding value to them. Furthermore, they are not just adding value on your behalf, but on the behalf of that online community writ large.
Powerful words, & an interesting insight into the front lines of our digital age. You can see the complete slideshow & read his remarks here.
![I FOUND A CRUCIFIXHigh on coffeebeans, w/books & a muffin in hand, headed homeward… I saw a crucifix in the shadows of North Beach. I looked for a long time. Then I photographed a ghost that haunts only certain hours of a day. Something inside of me surged. I do not think it was god, just a funny sort of love at being alive.
[ expired film ]](http://28.media.tumblr.com/MRcXpQ0mrqy4x2950QJLLQoCo1_r1_500.jpg)
I FOUND A CRUCIFIX
High on coffeebeans, w/books & a muffin in hand, headed homeward… I saw a crucifix in the shadows of North Beach. I looked for a long time. Then I photographed a ghost that haunts only certain hours of a day. Something inside of me surged. I do not think it was god, just a funny sort of love at being alive.
[ expired film ]
ANIMALS OF THE SKIES
All those arrogant birds mocked us for thousands of years from the clean expanse beyond our heads. Eventually we learned how to fly too, & they ridiculed our clumsy machines as impure. But we pushed on, threading higher & higher until, one day, we perched on the very moon… & any birds who may have followed were eaten up by the purity of space.
![Each night as the sun sets, the Berkeley hills are spotted w/little points of light, like small fires, from the west-facing windows there reflecting back to San Francisco. They move from sea level to cloud level in perfectly equal & opposite relation to the falling sunlight. It’s absolutely beautiful & otherworldly. But, you see, this sort of thing happens all the time…
[ I took this on someone else’s camera ]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/MRcXpQ0mrqjc3rskdP4iD5RZo1_500.jpg)
Each night as the sun sets, the Berkeley hills are spotted w/little points of light, like small fires, from the west-facing windows there reflecting back to San Francisco. They move from sea level to cloud level in perfectly equal & opposite relation to the falling sunlight. It’s absolutely beautiful & otherworldly. But, you see, this sort of thing happens all the time…
[ I took this on someone else’s camera ]
