rainy day on the
110, car crashes around
the next turn, and next
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Molussus Molussus
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Molossus
Caius and Aubre
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Walking in the fallen leaves
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Deep fried turkey
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Deep frying
Ray Foster
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Dave done deep frying
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Hannah
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well, we rounded miles of pack ice. luckily it was neatly smashed and no bergy bit dodgin. the sun is out. its below freezing, the icicles on the boat are not even melting. but the seas are calm. which is great. trying to figure out if these are my ‘glory days’ according to bruces standards. maybe. but ideally i’d have a cute dog, and good lookin boy on my boat. then it would be perfect. but till then, this will have to do. haha.
umm.. whatelse. everyone is dreading tommorrow, including me. an 18 hour day of driving equipment off and stacking more and more containers of STUFF on. its my most unfavorite activity, because i just don’t get it. where all the shit is supposed to go. ect. so i have to wait for people to tell me what to do, and what they need. . . and its going to be cold. that i know. and then we get to chain everything down, that takes hours and hours and hours… and i can never get it tight enough, makes me grumpy. but thats tommorrow, today on the other hand, is a very nice day. good weather so i can finally shower!
love
ume
Friday March 14
Arrived Loreto, $7 taxi to cheap hotel posada san martin, road grader out front
excavating the street. i shut the mosquitos in the bathroom; when i came back from
walking around town door was ajar, i had not jerked it shut but my gear was untouched.
dusty town in throes of major development, hotel and condo compl,exes, golf course,
hospital. took pictures of views, pelicans in the marina.
Saturday 15
met the guides, mexicanos roman from mexico city (marine bio background) and carlos
from la paz (law background, main guide with excellent fluent colloquial english)
and picked up part of the drill.
Sunday 16
van to puerto escondido, abandoned harbor down the coast—they didn’t know
why abandoned, developers disappeared—the group met skiff captain alejandro and
loaded on board:
*mark, 50ish investment consultant, ceo of 15 person connecticut firm, and 18 year
old college daughter abbie
*andrew hooten, brit anesthesiologist, living in sydney for 14 years
*simon, young new zealand former pepsi accounts manager & blonde australian
veterinary girlfriend, tracie, relocating from london back to auckland
* shirley, 51 year old ‘body worker’ from seattle
* kelley, 38 year old intel systems analyst from portland
* michelle & halley, two mid-thirties friends via seattle and philly
*edith, 50s heavily-accented french canadian head of northern regional environmental
protection agency for province of quebec
* terry, early 60s retired chicago high school teacher and her clinical physical
therapist daughter, 27, beth
that day we skiffed to a beach called agua verde and put to sea in double kayaks,
first time for many of us. edith took the single kayak. 7 or 8 nautical miles on
choppy seas south into a headwind hard on us, waves shoving the kayak off the line
so you’re zigzagging and paddling hard to make forward progress, getting splashed
in the brisk wind, sometimes the bow of the kayak smacking down after cresting a
wave, i was trying to figure out how and when the pedals made the rudder respond,
hard paddling the whole way (the woman in front, worried, doubtful, barely making
any headway so it was like i was paddling for two, and she stopped kayaking altogether
after the next day and rode in the skiff with alejandro the rest of the trip.)
Monday 17
rolling swells 2 – 3 feet but the wind not bad at all and the water much warmer
than the pacific off alta california, at our backs or sides 12 miles or so to the
private palm-lined beach of senor oscar moreno garibay’s beach rancho (rich
architect and yoga guru, his temescal and mystical facilities built on the ridge
behind the house) with a snorkel along the rocky point and fresh cold water shower
from a hose; after cooks alberto (short friendly guy from veracruz) and chuy (tall
guy who wore a pirate bandana born a few miles down the coast) cooked excellent
machaca fish with rice, beans and tortillas, everyone pissed and brushed their teeth
in the surf, went to bed early and got up before dawn—
Tuesday 18
calm sea, 2 – 3 foot swells later in the afternoon, the wind up later but at our
backs or sides, 24 – 25 miles to the long curving beach—they all curved—at puerto
gato where it rained a rare rain after the front blew the shade tarp down; the support
crew kept to themselves, while the kayakers drained the magaritas and liter bottles
of cerveza pacifico and told funny stories about topics that i could not even begin
to talk about (for example: experiences with luggage that DID NOT get lost in airports,
let me tell you about the time in rome that my luggage did not get lost…), so
that evening & afterward i ended up talking to manolo & his cousin paul,
both fishermen from puerto san carlos on the pacific side, translating for the gringas
flirting with them & alejandro & vice versa; manolo told me he got his girlfriend—now
his wife—pregnant at la prepa at age 17, been a shrimp fisherman in a cooperativa
with his own $2,000 panga with a $7 or $8,000 honda outboard motor ever since (also
diving for scallops, sometimes hauling in 300 pounds at a time), they sold the shrimp
catch for about $6 a pound in a steady market but he didn’t like it because
it was night work, 6 PM to 7 AM the next morning—at sea in the dark—and he was
looking for INGLES SIN BARRERAS and i told him i’d check in l.a. for a set less
than the $2000 it was selling for in mexico— manolo & paul would often end
their evenings using their cell phones as i-pods, exhausting the batteries listening
to music on their phones, staring at the dark (they plugged their phones into the
skiffs at night to recharge, they all had cell phones)—
Wednesday 19
kayaked a few miles ahead and walked into tiny village of tembabiche (i saw about
5 or 6 low wooden shacks made of recycled materials including some corrugated metal,
newer model pickup trucks or vehicles by them; guides gave away some clothing items
gringos brought down from the states to kids and teens, who accepted them casually
and did not seem in all that great need of them) tembabiche once was a 19th century
rancho funded by the 19th century pearl industry, the rise and fall of the family
pearl dynasty like a garcia marquez novel
the ruins of the grand colonial-style mansion rise above the shanties
kids played basketball on the concrete court beside the new unfinished round one-room
schoolhouse, and two very small kids rode off on a donkey
after we skiffed back to camp, we hiked through the pretty and thorny cactus garden
of the hills—old man cactus, cardon (like saguaro, but larger), palo adan (adam’s
wood, relative of the ocotillo also tipped with red blossoms), palo blanco, nearly
leafless, elephant tree, bulbous trunk like limbs with flaky peeling yellow-skinned
bark, una de gato (cats claw, everything had thorns), wild plum trees, a mile or
so to the top of a headland where we could see many dozens of miles up and down
the coast in the direction we’d come from, the direction we were headed, and
the rocks of offshore islands on the horizon
Thursday 20
7 miles along the baja coast (lunch stopover at chuy’s sister’s family settlement
—nopolo?—a cluster of three houses just above the beach) and then 4 miles crossing
open water to the island of san jose talking with terry paddling in tandem the whole
way; there went snorkeling again, again very limited visibility6 in water green
with algae like soup, the puffy blowfish, the potentially deadly venomous scorpion
fish that did not bother to move, angel fish, the weird long sticklike cornet fish,
water leaked into my mask and made me cough, it leaked from my sinuses a day afterward
Friday 21
awoken by shouts about the blue whale just offshore, everyone waited in the skiff
as i pissed in the surf and then jumped aboard to look at the thing, about 80 foot
long they guessed, the dorsal line curving out of the water
skiff around san jose island, then we kayaked a mile around the island thru holes
in big offshore rocks and sea caves and 6 mile paddle back to camp (again with terry,
age 61 or so, indefatigable and positive)
Saturday 22
skiff to la paz: bottle-nosed dolphins and manta rays leaping from the water, a
fin whale cruising, alejandro dragged a green sea turtle from the water and showed
it off, he steered the panga into the beach on the malecon directly in front of
the hotel they’d booked us into, and we jumped into the water and carried our bags,
sandy, sweaty and sunburnt across the waterfront avenue filled with tourists and
semana santa vacationers enjoying family vacation time (kids had two weeks off school);
very good trip—though we’d done only 55 or 65% seemingly of the 100 nautical miles of
paddling i’d originally thought we might do— i found i could do it—
All night taggers addicted to scribbling scurry across the city aching to graffitti signs, concrete—Wind dashes and pummels oily dark broken stony surface of harbor waters with lights beyond Ume’s tugboat—Office & facebukeros (Marisela Norte said) are tapping and nattering away, posting pictures, links, whims—ghosts tap away on long discarded typewriters of Kerouac, Hemingway, Faulkner—message machines collect random messages from Kaiser Permanente, mom, whomever—freeway overpasses denote upcoming exits, destinations—electronic board in Union Station is flashing arrivals and departures 24/7 as people look up, glance away—larvae chew lines across the leaves—Chinatown stale fortune cookies offer little snippets of curled encouragements—breezes skim thru glazed dessicated pictures and Alzheimer phrasing of porn magazines atop piles of landfill trash in the county dumps of Colorado & Wyoming—tides line the beaches with high water line of plastic litter, styrofoam, storm-tossed kelps and sticks, seagull eats out of the face of the dead elephant seal (the others stand aside uninterested)—coffee machine light—wispy clouds and dirty haze particulate an aching blue sky all gone in a blink, something looks and blinks—I write all this on a Yosemite postcard to Paul in Pacific Grove (28 cents stamp)—Sunlit wall colors & moving shapes flare across our retinae and recede in a blink—Curly pungent frangrance and experience imprint our dreams unrecorded—words and phrases annotate breaths—any high wind leaves lines of palm tree seeds on the driveway from the ragged heads of palms high overhead—sundial shadows of the railing crosses the balcony—someone smiles, someone waves, music plays with or without words, traffic resumes—
photo by Citlali Foster
fotos by Citlali Foster
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She helped fight for the freedom of young Mexican American men wrongly convicted of killing a farmworker near a swimming hole in southeast L.A. County.
Alice McGrath dies at 92; activist backed defendants in 1942 Sleepy Lagoon trial
“If I had never done anything since…my involvement in Sleepy Lagoon would justify my existence,” Alice McGrath told a Los Angeles Times interviewer in 1981.
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-alice-mcgrath29-2009nov29,0,3888600.story
By Margot Roosevelt
November 29, 2009
Alice McGrath, a lifelong activist who first gained fame as a champion of the wrongly convicted young Mexican Americans in the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon trial, has died. She was 92.
McGrath died Friday at Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura of an infection resulting from a chronic illness, said her daughter, Laura D’Auri. McGrath was taken to the hospital on Thanksgiving.
McGrath’s role in the infamous trial was celebrated in Luis Valdez’s play “Zoot Suit,” which debuted at the Mark Taper Forum in 1978 and was made into a movie in 1981.
“She was one of the heroines of the 20th century,” said Valdez, who remained a friend over the years. “In Los Angeles, I can’t think of many people who surpass her influence.”
McGrath was 24 when, recovering at home from a bout of pleurisy, she was visited by a friend who asked for some administrative help. Attorney George Shibley was defending 22 Mexican Americans, ages 17 to 21, who were charged with killing a young Mexican farmworker near a swimming hole in southeast L.A. County known as Sleepy Lagoon.
Shibley needed someone to write summaries of the daily proceedings of the trial, which would later become known as one of the most racist in local history.
The defendants, dubbed “zoot suit gangsters” by a xenophobic press after the long coats and pegged pants that were popular among Mexican Americans, were being tried en masse. Portrayed as members of the “38th Street Gang,” they were not allowed to consult with their lawyers during the 13-week trial. And in a tactic that made them look disreputable, they were not permitted to have their hair cut and were denied a change of clothes for the first month of the trial.
The judge was openly contemptuous of the defendants and their lawyers, and the all-white jury was allowed to go home at night, with access to sensationalist media coverage that focused on Mexican American delinquency.
Twelve were convicted of murder and the rest of lesser charges.
McGrath, who attended the trial after her illness subsided, was outraged, and began to volunteer with the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, which lobbied for an appeal. Committee head and renowned author Carey McWilliams was impressed with her passion and named her executive director.
McGrath would become an accomplished fundraiser and speaker, at one time addressing 1,000 longshoremen in San Francisco. She regularly visited the Sleepy Lagoon defendants at San Quentin State Prison.
In 1944, an appeals court overturned the convictions, finding there was no evidence that any of the young men had been involved in the killing.
Decades later, in 1981, McGrath would tell a Los Angeles Times interviewer that the successful appeal was “the most important event in my life. If I had never done anything since . . . my involvement in Sleepy Lagoon would justify my existence.”
Born Alice Greenfield in Calgary, Canada, on April 5, 1917, McGrath moved with her family to Los Angeles when she was 5. Her parents were Jews who had fled Czarist oppression in Russia.
As the daughter of the only Yiddish-speaking foreigners in her poor southwest L.A. neighborhood, she would later say that she understood the experience of being “the other.”
At various times in her life, she was a candy factory worker, an artists’ model and a sales representative for Grove Press, the avant-garde publisher where she took a job after her second husband, poet Thomas McGrath, was blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
Later, with her third husband, Bruce Tegner, she co-wrote books on martial arts and taught women self-defense. She held a brown belt in judo.
But it was as a volunteer that McGrath continued to have a social impact. In 1984, she visited Nicaragua to experience the Sandinista regime after the defeat of the Somoza dictatorship. And over the following decades, she would make 86 trips to the embattled country, taking farmers, lawyers and doctors to meet with their counterparts.
She helped get medicines for Nicaraguan hospitals, and after Hurricane Mitch in 1998, she raised funds for the homeless.
In Ventura, where she moved from L.A. in 1970, McGrath started a pro-bono legal aid program for low-income families.
“People say I’m an optimist,” she said in a speech in 2006. “I’m not. I’m a cheerful pessimist.”
When Valdez visited to research his play, McGrath introduced him to the former defendants and their families, and shared her papers, including letters back and forth from San Quentin, that are stored at UCLA.
“She was the heart line of my story,” Valdez said. “She maintained contact with ‘her boys,’ as she called them. She was a selfless person, with compassion and humor.”
Three weeks ago, when he paid her a visit in Ventura, he said, “She was 92 years young. She was vibrant.” And when Valdez mentioned his own upcoming 70th birthday, “her eyes opened wide and she laughed and said, ‘Oh, to be 70 again!’ “
McGrath is survived by a sister, Claire Jampol of Los Angeles, as well as by her daughter and a son, Daniel Schechter of Spokane Valley, Wash., both from her first marriage with businessman Max Schechter. Her first two marriages ended in divorce, and her third husband died in 1986.
The family is holding a private burial. A commemorative gathering will be planned.
margot.roosevelt@latimes.com
"Over there was where kids used to have their adventures, where the radio tower was blinking out messages halfway around the world, where the tales of exploration were made up on the spot, where spies had feelings and sea monsters came up out of the depths. He said looking over the edge," she said looking over the edge.
- “Over here, there were body parts, pieces of people. Everything was burnt down. Look around, nowadays you can;t even tell. All the earth is like that, even though in some places, you scratch the surface, the bones start coming up. Maybe it’s all here right under the surface. They were miners, or they wanted to be. They tried to run away, and they put them on a train, told them they were going to California, going to be safe. Then they unloaded them here,” he was saying.
- “There you go walking down the middle of the street telling stories. What the fuck do you know about trees? What is that tree called? What is it good for? How can you be trusted with anything of value if you do not know that tree? It’s the simplest thing. Which other simple things have yoiu missed out on? For you, there are some Peterson guides, and you better grab one. We offer the interstitial loaves, and the flavors of tiny salts, and you cannot even taste them,” he said, not looking at me but looking at the other one, who also did not look at me.
- “Can I help you? Do you speak my language? I speak four languages. I am a woman of my own time, and you do not have the faintest sense of how that feels. For example, the third pineal eye is not speaking through you,” she was saying.
My spirit was swirling. My heart was catching on corners. The sickles and the tools were verbalizing. You read Franz Kafka, right? You got that look about you, about the wrinkly clothes. I have a letter for you. It is from the flesh color of persimmons," he said, smiling.
"I was in your coffee. I was in your tea, too. I was in your shirt. I was in your clean hair. I was under your fingernails. I was in your spinal elasticity. I was in the sensation of sunshine on your cheek. I am almost through supporting you in this manner," he was saying with his little laugh.
"I work the machine that creates a country between us, around us. You might have noticed, it's been great outside lately. I added a little something extra for you. It's coming your way, any minute now. You don't have to wait around, don't worry. You'll know it when you see it," she was saying.
"To summarize: steamed broccolli, not unlike brussels sprouts, clothing from the army surplus rack, and many days and months from the army surplus racks, along the edge of deserts on a straight highway. Absurdness of life, is that really your penis in that thing?" he was saying.
"I'm calling you from my station, yeah, but I don't really have time to go into that now. The motherfucker got the cops on me, they cuffed me and kicked my ass. I just got out, which is what---yeah, that's right. Sorry to have to---but you know, I have to ask to borrow some more cash. I have to have it right now or I'm gonna be---I have to. Or I'm gonna be in a bind, yeah. I wouldn't do it unless I had to, you know that. I'm serious. Yeah, that guy. I'll be moving on soon---I'll come by to pick it up. Sure, I love you too. But you know what? Green is green, that's it," he was saying before he hung up.
"Green is green. Control is effort. Modernity is modal. Rays are shining. The rain was raining. Matter is material. Things are things," he was saying.
"You can't be here. It's too dangerous," he was saying.
"Actually this is not even a picture, it's just a memory or a dream or something. It certainly doesn't exist in what you would call real time. If you listen you can hear people eating in restaurants, traffic negotiating streets at dusk. The actual sky is wide and blank," she was saying, like I thought.
"We're not going to bother you about the trees. We know you're sensitive to that. We can see you brought along your little book. You're taking notes, trying to get some information, not to seem completely lost. We just wanted to know if you had tried---or even noticed---the interstitial loaves, and the tiny salt?" he was saying, maybe glancing at me a little this time.
"Anything you might see, including the sensations of your fingertips, you might not believe this, but I prefigured it. The horse that ran in a circle. The men working in a line. The sentient thought that you had on a Sunday, while feeling not sick for the first time in awhile. The blade releases it from the grain of wood," he was saying, so it seemed.
"You cannot see me at the moment, but I was here. Oscillation of blood corpuscles, spritely as fig seeds in the nutty fruit. Think beyond the sound of the traffic. Think beyond the limits of your particular one-sided thought. On the other side of the fact, its intrinsic thisness. Make your spit juicy again," he was saying.
"Walking around the yard of childhood. My footprints like a little Martian's. Somebody's car was on fire in the desert, maybe that's where daddy went. Mom was crying in the kitchen, the noise came out of the window. The wind was blowing on that sound. The dog acted like it knew what I was waiting for. I don't know whatever happened to that dog," he was saying.
"Your intestines are made of seaweed. Your visions are made of electricity. Your bones are made of cement. Your wires are made of hair. Your children are made of candy. Your words are made out of surfaces. Your choices are made out of nightmares. Your blood is made out of water," he said to everyone, as if he was saying to himself.
"Ishigo saw these dust traces on the windowsill, viewed through the blinds you see before you. Ishigo was here. Ishigo exhaled into this afternoon breeze. This window in the desert attaches to Ishigo's city. If you ask Ishigo, he might tell you. If you get a chance to meet Ishigo," she was saying.
(1922)
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Prior to the October Revolution, Futurism–as a unified, exactly formulated trend–did not exist in Russia.
Critics christened everything that was revolutionary and new with this name.
Our group, the so-called (unfortunately) Cubo-Futurists (V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, D. Burliuk, A. Kruchenykh, V. Kamensky, N. Aseev, O.M. Brik, S. Tretyakov, B. Kushner) was a group of Futurists welded together by ideology.
We had no time to deal with the theory of poetry; we were busy putting it into practice.
The only manifesto of this group was the introduction to the anthology “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”, published in 1913. It was a poetic manifesto, expressing the goals of Futurism in emotional slogans.
The October Revolution marked a departure of our group from the numerous Futuro-imagists who had moved away from revolutionary Russia. It turned us into a group of “Communist-Futurists”, with these literary tasks:
1) To establish the literary art as a tradecraft in words–not as an aesthetic stylization, but as the ability to solve in words any problem.
2) To respond to any task set by the present day;
a) to undertake work on vocabulary (new word formations, sound instrumentation, etc.)
b) to replace the conventional metrics of iambs and trochees with the polyrhythms of language itself.
c) to revolutionize syntax (simplification of the forms of word combinations, the shock of unusual word usage, etc.)
d) to renew the semantics of words and word combinations.
e) to create models of intriguing subject formations.
f) to reveal the ability of the word acting as poster.
The solution of the enumerated literary problems will create the possibility of satisfying needs in the most diverse spheres of literary creation (the form, article, telegram, poem, feuilleton, billboard, call to action, advertisement, and others).
Concerning the question of prose:
1) There is no genuinely Futuristic prose; there are individual attempts by Khlebnikov, by Kamensky, Kushner’s Meeting of Palaces–but these attempts are less significant than the poetry of these same authors. This is explained by the fact that:
a) Futurists make no distinction between the different genres of poetry and view all of literature as a unified literary art.
b) before the Futurists it was assumed that lyric poetry had its own circle of themes, its own look, different from the themes and language of so-called artistic prose; for Futurists, this distinction does not exist.
c) before the Futurists it was assumed that poetry had one set of tasks (poetic), and practical speech another set (unpoetic); for Futurists, composing the call for a struggle against typhoid and love poetry are merely different sides of the same literary process.
d) so far, Futurists have produced predominately poetry. This is because, in the revolutionary epoch, when life has still not hardened, there is a demand for a lyric poetry of slogans, whipping up the practice of revolution, and not a Nestorlike summing up of the results of this practice.
e) and only in the most recent time has the task of producing models of the contemporary epic appeared before the Futurists. Not a bureaucratic-descriptive epic, but one that is genuinely tendentious or fantastically utopian, presenting life not as it is, but as it undoubtedly will be and should be.
V. Mayakovsky
1/IX 1922
Russian text from: Literaturnoye nasledstvo: Novoye o Mayakovskom. Glavnii redaktor: V.V. Vinogradov. Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR. Moskva. 1958. st. 175-178.
English translation by: Eric Konkol
The English version of Mayakovsky on Futurism appeared originally in the SovLit.com Thin Journal, Issue #3 (September 2006)
For more information on the Thin Journal and to subscribe, visit:
http://www.sovlit.com/thin
http://sovlit.com/mayakovskyonfuturism/
see also: “The LEF Program” by Vladimir Mayakovsky et al
for mayakovsky audio files:
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