You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2009.
"Boundless Commuter of the Skies." One of our first efforts to get off the ground, we're working to make human-powered flight a personal travel option. Avoid gridlock, go as the crow flies. Freedom. $2K ready to ship anywhere to you in easy-to-build kit, all you need is a Philips head screwdriver, adjustable wrench and a pair of pliers. Included in this offer today are FREE flying goggles, hygienic "Flight bag," and 1 lb Ranchero queso fresco.
"Glories of the Air." I built the prototype for this machine using peanut butter and bamboo sticks, Ray Foster's old letters and lawn mowers, things that should have been said but weren't, afixed with the last late light of the afternoon. Added lift was provided by the uncle who always said, "You're gonna turn out to be scum of the earth like your old man." We were tearing the guts out of a house we bought in El Sereno and remodeled when he came to check it out---the big Malemute jumped happily on him, accidently tearing a long groove in the skin of his old man's arm. He's been dead fifteen years, and the dog, ten. When this machine first rose in the air, the vistas were magnificent, the wind whistling through the guy wires, the flaps flapping.
Home Launch System (hill not provided). Certain specified flying machines are guaranteed lift-off and actual mileage only with this easy-to-use, easy-to-install optional Home Launch System, only $2K special today, includes ostrich skin gloves and replica Colima dog.
East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines Tower. Realized on visionary plans of Vladimir Tatlin on the site of the former Manny's El Loco in Lincoln Heights, our new facility not only provides passengers with easy access to ground transport, but launching facilities for their personal human-powered flying machines at reasonable docking fees. Hangar storage extra. Once your kids try the slide chutes to the ground level, they'll never want to return to ground transport again! More info, Lilia at 1 800 DIRIGBL
"The Student." Originally available to all through state college and university programs, this elitist ultra-expensive model is designed to fold up and fit into a student backpack. Unaffordable to the average "pay me to party" youngster, you will be glad to equip your student with this "green machine" constructed from recycled LAUSD textbooks, malt liquor cans, nearsighted eyeglasses and military prosthetics. Complete zero carbon footprint---all your child has to do to go far like a tiny speck over the vast horizon is study hard, unfold his or her personal machine and start pedaling upwards. Pedal hard, chamacos. $4M
"The Individualist." Go your own way in this sleek airship, whose watchwords are Freedom, Medical Insurance, War and Ponzi Schemes. Get yours first, leave everyone else behind. Fly away into the sky and leave those suckers below trapped in traffic. Our "green machine" is wholly 100% recycled from parts of car companies that no longer exist, abandoned manufacturing plants that no longer produce anything, worthless stocks and bonds from fraudulent investments, etc., making this the vehicle of choice not only for turning the economy around, but for putting all that bad news behind us. Release your aspirations into the upper atmosphere. Solar powered models practically standard. $4M
"The Rebel." Hundreds of millions of losers are stuck in the rut of the daily grind, living out dreams supplied to them on cable TV. But not you, man/woman. You are just too too much! Rebel against everything and all of it by going your own way, far from the lame crowd lined up to purchase the latest cell phone. You already have your phone, now express your macho (or macha!) tendencies by streaking across the wide open blue toward your wild destiny! Be the leader! $3M, hybrid models slightly higher where available.
"The Floating Eye." You're leaving behind the pedestrian thinkers, the dirty toilers, the dreamless drones trapped in their excuses, their addictions, their dead-ends, rising into a limitless spiritual plane of life. Weightless as dreams, you will float above it all unreachable by trivial mass miseries, quotidian follies of circumstance like illness or bad luck, policies or politics. You'll be one of the select elite viewing the earthbound human condition through the Floating Eye on objective reality, swooping high above in the slipstream, encapsulated by the ultimate in personal freedom. Return to earth at your disgression, at your whim, citizen of the wind. $5M, completely solar-powered zero carbon footprint. Recycled from totally wasted lives.
Call Lilia or myself at 1 800 DIRIGIBL to change your old earthbound life forever. Personal human powered flight can be yours today; if you qualify for a major credit card, you qualify for financing at our special low-to-variable interest "balloon" payment rates. Imagine your new life today!
East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines delivers the latest in personal transportation and human powered flight. Visit our offices at East Los Dirigible Air Transport Tower off Mission Road near the Los Angeles River, or simply dial 1 800 DIRIGIBL
"Raising tuition is a tax on poor and working people. Firing teachers and cutting education budgets is an attack on working people. California was supposed to have an education system equivalent to its status as 8th largest economy in the world, providing access to education for its citizens equal to elite private colleges of the East Coast. There was a whole progressive vision for the state that is forgotten, erased by generations of individualism, consumerism and greed at the highest levels," I was saying it to everyone, but I was saying it to myself, because it was like I was speaking some foriegn language of Nayarit.
"Get up, get up you dog!" I said to the animal. "Somebody must listen to my stories about how the world was pissed away in movies, personal electronics, distractions of spiritual disease of all times, encrudescences protruding from the flesh of human lives." He perked up his big ears.
I myself had personal issues to deal with. Awkward projections of lust toward inanimate objects caused me to throw myself on gopher holes, tree stumps or piles of melons. TV said to take drugs and call your doctor for erections lasting longer than four hours. On days like that it took me hours to get out of the house.
The animal put on his human face and peered at me with concern. "Don't be an asshole," he was saying, "Don't act like a jerk. Stop spitting lame-ass ideas. Try to be useful to somebody else. What are your dreams really about?" I understood everything he was telling me when he wore that mask.
When I tried to explain to him, he gave me his regular look. Sometimes I looked at the animal, he looked like an ordinary dog. He looked like he wanted food. He probably wanted to go to the sidewalk and pee on everything. It seemed so natural, I never bothered to ask, "Why is your tail hollow? If I blow on it, do you make a whistling sound?"
Sometimes the animal had an urge to go play in the street with his friends. I felt I had to watch out for him in the street. The world is so risky for animal desires.
I was exercising, trying to get in shape. I had a lot of time to make up for, trying to get through dead centuries---it seemed to me---and break through the living present. I was working on my speed, my reflexes, feeling slower with years. Time to stop messing around and get to work!
The animals were always hungry. They like the tender elote. I fed them, and made something for myself. You got to eat to produce. You got to take care of yourself and the animal desires crawling on top of you.
Luckily (as Bukowski said), there's usually someone or something around to tell me what to do. We are part of various collectives. We are paying our dues. For instance, this woman showed up at the door, dressed in a cute black sweater and asked, "What would you do if you sacrificed your only given son for them and they didn't know you or even like you?"
The animals were dancing in the street. The vehicles streamed around their happy whirling desires. Sunshine enfused all things with solar glare. My days are saturated with sweetness like tamarindo juice.
I told Ben, Teto and Roberto that we would meet, plan, scheme, innovate, collaborate, make stuff happen. Somehow, ideas would break out. Somehow, visions would be secreted into plain air. Leonor mentioned she was going to run errands.
I put on the right kind of T-shirt, not the dirty one from yesterday. I hadn't survived through the centuries and thousands of miles to get stuck on the sidelines, frozen in time, motionless for eternity, doing nothing for my people. Bring it on.
I had a cup of coffee. Day had streamed over the mountains hours earlier. It was blasting like terrific furious music. Luckily, I had people to talk to like Marialice and Reyes who showed what could be done with the inner spark of our lives.
I was looking inside myself, what did I have to give. Whatever it might be, give it all. Don't worry about the dust from the stars and centuries and the dirty street. Don't forget your parts. Ouch---that's my foot! Get yourself together now!
A co-worker thanked me for being helpful, but I hadn't done a damned thing, I felt. I sure hadn't saved her job. She'd just started, made significant advances, and they laid her off. She was going to have to start over. Imagine? What was I doing about it? What had I really gotten done?
I was hitting the streets. I made my calls. I put out the word. We put it in motion. Who knows, but we would see!
My animal is furious about this situation. He is shaking, he is vibrating like the train tracks when the big train is coming. This bullshit situation of ripping off the people shall not stand.
Foto by Dolores Bravo Japanese American National Museum
- here I get ready to ask the Andy Warhold foundation for money to fund the next generation dirigible. It will resemble a huge summer squash.
- thanks Clement Hanami for the Crossings: America’s Concentration Camps exhibit, reading and reception!
Foto by Dolores Bravo Japanese American National Museum
Foto by Dolores Bravo Japanese American National Museum
Leupp, AZ 1942
AT THE JAPANESE AMERICAN NATIONAL MUSEUM, Little Tokyo, Los Angeles: As part of the 10th Anniversary Celebration, we will have a closing reception for the exhibition Crossings on Saturday June 20 at 2pm. Included will be a tour of the exhibition followed by a reading with Sesshu Foster. Admission to the museum and this event is free so please invite all your friends!
“Crossings: 10 Views of America’s Concentration Camps” is an exhibition providing artists’ perspectives into the mass incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II by the U.S. government. The exhibition looks at art based on this subject in an attempt to provide greater insight into a dark episode of American history.
Location: Japanese American National Museum
Street: 369 East First Street
City/Town: Los Angeles, CA
Phone: 2136250414
Email: info@janm.org
Leupp 1942
The club meets at the Zep Diner of course, 515 Florence, by the Goodyear Plant. Jose Lopez-Feliu might be wearing his fake beard and discussing his show on the Recent Rupture Radio Hour. Rheim Akhadi might be reduplicating the gestures of morgue workers of Baghdad. Me and Zenzon are always talking about what Harry Gamboa and Mario Ybarra might be up to. The waitresses keep feeding us pie and coffee, cottage cheese and peach slices, and the special chili.
At our Annual Chicken and Wine Picnic of the Air, lucky winners get to swirl the merlot and toss the chicken bones overboard, whilst paper napkins whirl overhead. Last year we almost lost a chihuahua, but we found it later.
It's really complicated building these aluminio-titanium auto-charging electric airships based on discarded pre-war German blueprints, Chinese ideas and Cuba libres. Plus we have to locate abandoned warehouses full of useable tools and stuff. Luckily it's way easier since the free trade Republicans have destroyed the world economy. There's empty warehouses all over the city. Here's what it looks like from the inside.
Deluxe passengers get to totter about the promenade and look down upon rush hour traffic in gridlock all around the city, as they casually swoop from downtown to Montebello, from Highland Park to Downey. With the freedom of the air, our passengers enjoy a relaxed luxurious sense of leisure, without the high cost of sitting in traffic burning high octane. Fly East L. A. Dirigible Air Transport today.
Here's what the world looks like from the control room of the world's most sophisticated fuel efficient form of air transportation. From here I can see all the way from Eagle Rock to El Monte. From the San Gabriel mountains to the sea. Where did I put my glasses? The sun looks like a splotch of melting orange. The freeways look like the L.A. river---or that is the L.A. river.
I was in the Zep Diner talking about Harry Gamboa and Mario Ybarra with this guy, whoever he is. He told me his name but it was late in the afternoon for me and I wasn't paying attention. The waitress kept bringing plates of apple pie a la mode, fried chicken a la Reies Flores, and cottage cheese and chili. I couldn't keep up. He said his goal was to stay in love and write the best novel ever.
Sometimes we go fishing from the dirigible on the weekends. It takes a long line but you can snag great catches of giant grouper, barracuda, yellowtail and snapper. Sometimes we can drop down to sea level, skim the waves and send out a couple passengers on a line around their waist and snorkel gear. They bring back everything from lobster to abalone, and we can drop the water ballast and zoom back into the sky for extra thrills, leaving them spinning in the air like voladores.
We're busy readying new ships on different sides of town, expecting to operate new lines that will far outpace Cal Trans development of the subways. This of course is all part of our master financial plan, where we shall get rich quick, in spite of world wide economic depression brought on by those losers from the 20th century. Here's the ELAS Flores Magon, which as Tom Lutz suggests, shall put the Encino-Temecula route back on schedule.
Here's the flagship, ELAS Agnes Smedley, which is currently missing. We expect to locate it any minute now. It seems to have been hijacked by some radical girl pilot trainee who flew off in quixotic search for the legendary mythical "Sky City" created by swirling trash and tornado debris exacerbated by global warming in the upper atmosphere.
Of course when we get our flagship back, ELAS Agnes Smedley, we will again be able to offer our award-winning in-flight meals which beat out airline food anywhere, since our specially trained cooks make the sopes, gorditas and huaraches right there, and we're the only air transport service to offer birria and menudo on weekends. Call ahead for orders to go.
East L.A. Airship Colima recently added to service. Our Lines and Service will be very convenient and efficient: The most Professional of all the Dirigible Transport Operations of East Los Angeles. Soon Serving the Communities of: Boyle Heights, Belvedere Heights, Lincoln Heights, City Terrace, El Sereno, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Southgate, Crystal Cove, with stops in City of Vernon, Commerce and Rosemead. 2009 End of the Automotive Era! Look for this ship atop a tall building near you, and come aboard!
Our newest innovation is this small one-man airship we're calling "Economic Bailout" since it only has room for one. We're looking for some brave soul to be the first test pilot. Rick Harsch flew the last one over the mountains into the desert and we haven't heard from him since. If you need a job just dial 1-800-DIRIGBL
2009 end of the Automotive Era! New forms of transportation are coming for the people! Look for our summer specials on East L.A. Dirigible Air Transport from East L.A., the San Gabriel Valley and the Inland Empire direct to the beach. Swooping down low, with high dives off the quarter deck!
Poetry juice!
Tuesday, June 30, 6:30-8pm
Second Annual Bryant Park Reading: Sesshu Foster, Adrienne Su, and Vijay Seshadri.
Join us for three critically acclaimed poets at Word For Word Poetry at the Bryant Park Reading Room.
@ Bryant Park Reading Room
(btwn 5th & 6th Avenue, adjacent to the James Earl Dodge monument)
FREE and open to the public
Adrienne Su teaches poetry-writing workshops, contemporary American poetry, Writing about Food and Culture, and a hybrid literature-and-creative-writing course called The Craft of Poetry. She is also director of Dickinson’s creative writing program.
Su is the author of these books of poems: Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997), Sanctuary (Manic D Press, 2006), and Having None of It (Manic D Press, 2009). In 2007 she received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Virginia, Su has had residencies at Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In the summer of 2003, she was the resident poet at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, the house where Robert Frost wrote many of his early poems.
Poems appear in anthologies including The New American Poets, Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, Best American Poetry 2000, and Literature and Its Writers: A Compact Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (4th edition). Middle Kingdom has been translated into Chinese and was released in China in 2006. Poems recently appeared in the journals Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, New Letters, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review, and Oxford American.
Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 20 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. One of his last readings at St. Mark’s Poetry Project NYC is Mp3 archived at www.salon.com and local readings are archived at www.sicklyseason.com. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the website, www.ELAguide.org. His most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook.
Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954 and came to America at the age of five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where his father taught chemistry at Ohio State University, and has lived in many parts of the country, including the Pacific Northwest, where he spent five years working in the fishing and logging industries, and New York’s Upper West Side, where he was a sometime graduate student in Columbia’s Ph.D. program in Middle Eastern Languages and Literature. His collections of poems include James Laughlin Award winner The Long Meadow (Graywolf Press, 2004) and Wild Kingdom (1996). His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in AGNI, The American Scholar, Antaeus, Bomb, Boulevard, Lumina, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, Verse, Western Humanities Review, The Yale Review, the Times Book Review, the Philadelphia Enquirer, Bomb, The San Diego Reader, and TriQuarterly, and in many anthologies, including Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, Contours of the Heart, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, and The Best American Poetry 1997 and 2003.
Seshadri has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been awarded The Paris Review‘s Bernard F. Conners Long Poem Prize and the MacDowell Colony’s Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement. He holds an A.B. degree from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. He currently teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
Eat poetry.
* Are you “Jackrabbit bones and sagebrush.”
* Or are you “Vulture cranium and black oak”?
* Or “Gopher teeth and tamarisk”?
* Or are you “Egg shells and saltbush”?
* Or are you “Coyote fur and shadscale”?
* Or are you “Raven feathers and ephedra”?
* Or “Egret vertebra and prickly pear”?
* Or are you real mixed up, “Mockingbird cries and burro bush”?
* Or are you “Rattler stench and cottonwood puffs”?
* Or “Skink blue and greasewood”?
* Or “Mouse shriek and cheatgrass”?
* Or are you “Gull wing and willows”?
* Or are you really, finally, “Pronghorn metacarpals and star tulips”?
foto by Dianna Santillano-Romo
East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines 
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