soul sacrifice

Duende, circa 1969 (Santana w/19 yr old Mickael Shrieve on drums).

a moment to pitch health care reform…

Interviewed by Bill Moyers, Robert Reich does a good job of explaining the current health care debate. “A powerful coalition has emerged to keep the profit in sickness and disease — the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, the big drug companies, the insurance giants, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, all of them opposed to what my guest says is real health care reform.” — Bill Moyers. See the video HERE.

The furries are tracking me!

Parataxis

Recently received a copy of Matt Hill’s book, Parataxis. (BlazeVOX books). Jeez, it’s been almost two years since my last post to Ply, so I thought I would re-start it with a reply to “Ur Gnomics” (you can read the poem by clicking on the link above).

Sound of the day

Germinate by Ben Makinen.

ply

I have neglected my ply blog. Seemed like a good idea at the time. I think it still is. I changed the template, put on a new dress, added a photograph, made some revisions. Funny, though, on tumblr, when you revise, the date doesn’t change.

artists

Some disjointed family history: my father’s stepfather had some land, and was pressured by the local catholic clergy to donate it to the church. My father always held some resentment towards the church, and unlike most Catholic Filipinos, was not observant in any way. Although he never mentioned it to me, it’s possible that he was an atheist, or an agnostic. This is very unusual in a Filipino family.

In his youth, my dad traveled from the southern Philippines to urban Manila, where he was apprenticed to a famous artist, which led to his training as a commercial artist and signmaker. To be a signmaker in those days, was to be a calligrapher, to learn how to apply special inks and gold leaf. In the late 1920s, he decided to make the great migration to the U.S., where he hoped for a future in commercial art. It was the beginning of the Great Depression.

He ended up working in the fields, picking hops, potatoes, and other crops, traveling to Alaska to work in the canneries, and down south to California. When WWII came along, he got a better job as a Merchant Marine, where he worked as a cook. He worked for the Matson Lines until his retirement. My mother had a somewhat similar experience in the U.S. While in the Philippines, she worked in a bank. When she arrived in the U.S., in the late 1940s, the only jobs she could find were in a cannery and a laundry.

When I was a kid, maybe about 6 or 7, my dad brought me a box full of oil paints and brushes, turpentine, and linseed oil, along with all the other things that go with it; a palette, canvas, an easel. Later he brought me a hunk of clay, with tools and books on how to make sculptures. These were not “children’s” versions of this art material — it wasn’t a kiddie paint set, or play-doh. I was expected to take care of these materials like an adult would. The examples given in the clay book were sculptures by Rodin and Giacommetti.

Nevertheless, it was all fun. I opened my encylopedia Britannica to the art section, and set out trying to make reproductions of the “great works of art,” including the Mona Lisa. I could’ve grown up to be a great forger.

I was a child of the 1950s and 60s. But one day my father brought home a painting instruction book by someone (I forget who) who was strongly influenced by the social realist artists (the Ash Can school) of the Depression era. At that point in time, the book was sort of a throwback to the old days that most artists wanted to forget. He could’ve brought me other books; in the late 1950s/early 60s, most artwork had a more upbeat, brightly colored look, with sharp lines.

This book contained paintings and sketches of working class people in New York, people working, reading newspapers, playing on the streets, falling asleep in subway trains. New York was like a foreign country to me, compared to bright, sunny California. The colors of the city were subdued. The painters and illustrators didn’t try to reproduce things exactly. I was fascinated with the way they used blobs of paint to make something that approximated a figure. I realized the painter or illustrator was probably a worker too, along with everyone else. The book impressed itself on my mind, visually, and otherwise. I learned that to be an artist was to be an observer and recorder of daily life – to be in the life, and not somehow above it.

My mother enrolled me in ballet classes, and piano classes when I was around 5. That lent another, more physical dimension to my experience of art.

Anyway, I was thinking about my childhood today, which I’ve always seen as sort of fortunately involved with the arts — especially considering that my parents never read anything but newspapers and Readers Digest. But now I think that my parents may have been determined to turn me into an artist.

alien

Been listening to Moby’s new album, Wait for me. This artist knows that what everyone needs is a dramatic soundtrack to their life. Except he goes a step further and makes everyone else’s apocalyptic soundtrack part of yours. yes, I want David Bowie to sing my life, please ["don't let me make the same mistake again..."] It’s mournful. It’s sad. I love it.

I was listening to it when I visited my old hometown, Santa Cruz, this evening — which may be why I felt like an alien. Everything in the downtown area changes so fast. Suddenly there are two new massage therapy spas. Suddenly, La Vie, the raw foods cafe has been replaced by a carnivore’s den. Suddenly a 12 million dollar building memorializing Emmett Rittenhouse has materialized, complete with neo-classical columns and a rams’ head over each tall window. Suddenly, there are three hookah lounges and a new music store, and the decrepit Old Tannery is now a modern live-work loft complex and artists’ community. Once a dorky, alternative lifestyle granola kind of place, Santa Cruz is now extremely hip. I can smell it.

I’m not complaining. Change happens. But it’s a bit disorienting — especially, I suppose, because I now live in a rural area, where, by comparison, the most exciting event happening is that the succulent nursery is putting a new coat of paint on the house out front, which is being turned into a little store. And the chestnut mare in the pasture at the bottom of the hill now has a foal.

more fragrant

ah the smell of hemlock in the morning – prolific
usurper of the poppy, remembered for nosy Socrates’
blood; Athens chose well. a field of amorous weed

scents; maybe Demeter has something to match this,
who knows. but now i see, the way to go is up at crack
of dawn, before the tourists. Bay Fresh Seafood’s motors

are humming, the Mbari ship groans under the weight
of all that research; crab nets are stacked. I say happy
birthday, Frank O’Hara; you’re gone, but maybe there is

a heaven, and some sweet man-angel for you. Even
Castroville’s one main street, with its four bars and
half dozen produce stands has its fond memories, e.g.

Norma Jean, the thistle queen; I mean the artichoke
of course. Slip some garlic cloves between its petals -
a delicious lunch poem, more fragrant than hemlock.

– for Michael

interpenetrations: buffalo

A verrry interesting reading/conversation will be taking place in Buffalo, this weekend (27th), featuring Geof Huth and Tom Beckett. Not your usual reading. Wish I could be there. But if you are near Buffalo, NY, you must go!

factors

Shiny blue tractor parked by the side of the hwy 1 near Nashua Rd. The dunes and the Marina fields were golden. That is, they are — when the fog or the clouds allow the sunlight to shine through.

Some of the fields are green. This morning the strawberry pickers in the fields were running with their crates. They run for their money. The fields smell like jam.

Treadmills. The broken ones, and the ones that work. CNN on the screen. Keeping track of things. Charting, adding up, distributing. Misc. hours. Research hours. Email. Thanks. Thanks again.

The building where I work is on the side of a hill. It was once a school. An old human-sized Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat is painted on the wall near my office. I walk by the Cat in the Hat every day.

Nearly every day, the clouds climb the hill from the ocean side — the side obscured by the hill from our sight — and then glide or drift down the Monterey side, over the trees and houses. It’s our natural refrigeration system. It keeps the weather from getting too pleasantly warm. As I write this I’m thinking of turnip greens.

factors

a woman named “voice” becomes rallying point; eyes open
landscape moves past, cars move, sun, buildings, parking lots
a distancing in effect. even the desire for sugar recedes
walking lately up and down hills (sitting and mortality rates)
numbness sets in; not really looking. the habit of reticence
is good for nothing except reporting the passing of phenomena
hot in sun, cool in shade; homely blue jay; getting winded
forgetfulness of highways; in that they induce forgetfulness
why remember. why this or that. writing. why even just this.