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out of nothing reading!
Date: Sunday, August 2, 2009
Time: 5:00pm – 7:00pm
Location: New Puppy Gallery (www.newpupplyla.com)
Street: 2808 Elm St. #1
City/Town: Los Angeles, CA off San Fernando Road (Mount Washington)
Celebrating 2 seasons of new work in image, sound, text and the digital arts.
5pm Sunday / August 2nd
w/ readings by:
Saehee Cho
Andrew Choate
Daiana Feuer
Sesshu Foster
Sergio Hernandez
Jeremy Hight
Maxi Kim
Gerard Olson
Vanessa Place
Analisa Raya-Flores
Thomas Trudgeon
Laura Vena
Christine Wertheim
Jared Woodland
[out of nothing] is an electronic publication featuring new works in image, sound, text and the digital arts, as well as works located at the intersections between these media. It is edited by Janice Lee, Eric Lindley, and Joseph Milazzo.
Email: shelling.peanuts@gmail.com
Host:[out of nothing]
Time:5:00PM Sunday, August 2nd
Location:New Puppy Gallery (www.newpupplyla.com)
Succulent summer sunshine, sleeping veterano facedown on the grass, they fold the tables and load them in the back of vans. Whatever happened happened, a few people sit on folding chairs chatting. Antonio Villaraigoisa stood in front of the L.A. Times building in a mayoral white shirt and spiffy suspenders, hair shining, laughing with the reporters, but now only a few office workers or business women hurry by. Diesel fumes from passing buses linger in daylight smacking like fried food, the moment smoky as chipotle. How is your indifference today? How will you pass beneath my shade?
lean in a little closer
Climbing Milestone Mountain, August 22, 1937
by Kenneth Rexroth
For a month now, wandering over the Sierras,
A poem had been gathering in my mind,
Details of significance and rhythm,
The way poems do, but still lacking a focus.
Last night I remembered the date and it all
Began to grow together and take on purpose.
We sat up late while Deneb moved over the zenith
And I told Marie all about Boston, how it looked
That last terrible week, how hundreds stood weeping
Impotent in the streets that last midnight.
I told her how those hours changed the lives of thousands,
How America was forever a different place
Afterwards for many.
In the morning
We swam in the cold transparent lake, the blue
Damsel flies on all the reeds like millions
Of narrow metallic flowers, and I thought
Of you behind the grille in Dedham, Vanzetti,
Saying, “Who would ever have thought we would make this history?”
Crossing the brilliant mile-square meadow
Illuminated with asters and cyclamen,
The pollen of the lodgepole pines drifting
With the shifting wind over it and the blue
And sulphur butterflies drifting with the wind,
I saw you in the sour prison light, saying,
“Goodbye comrade.”
In the basin under the crest
Where the pines end and the Sierra primrose begins,
A party of lawyers was shooting at a whiskey bottle.
The bottle stayed on its rock, nobody could hit it.
Looking back over the peaks and canyons from the last lake,
The pattern of human beings seemed simpler
Than the diagonals of water and stone.
Climbing the chute, up the melting snow and broken rock,
I remembered what you said about Sacco,
How it slipped your mind and you demanded it be read into the record.
Traversing below the ragged arête,
One cheek pressed against the rock
The wind slapping the other,
I saw you both marching in an army
You with the red and black flag, Sacco with the rattlesnake banner.
I kicked steps up the last snow bank and came
To the indescribably blue and fragrant
Polemonium and the dead sky and the sterile
Crystalline granite and final monolith of the summit.
These are the things that will last a long time, Vanzetti,
I am glad that once on your day I have stood among them.
Some day mountains will be named after you and Sacco.
They will be here and your name with them,
“When these days are but a dim remembering of the time
When man was wolf to man.”
I think men will be remembering you a long time
Standing on the mountains
Many men, a long time, comrade.
Calif. buckeye presumes to speak
Who said you are qualified to describe ordinary things?
Who said you understand the ordinary things of your own daily life?
How would you like it if we developed a trillion bright new ideas every day?
Would you like the California buckeye kingdom conceiving a trillion new things like paramedics, periodontists, plasma rays or cellophane, Pall Malls or half-lives?
Have you noticed the glossy verdance of palmate leaves, unfurling deciduous, profuse, pale underneath?
Have you noticed my glycoside aeusculin, which Costanoan, Salinan, Kitanemuk, Serrano, Wappo, Sierra Miwok, Coast Miwok, Pomo, Chumash, Kawaiisu, Northern Maidu leached in streams from my red nuts?
My nuts are reddish brown, smooth and leathery—one or two seeds inside—and for you—come closer, I will grow hair.
Broadway & 3rd, "The Pope of Broadway," by Eloy Torrez
In February I hiked 9 miles (18 round trip) from Eaton Canyon Nature Center in Pasadena about four thousand feet up the old toll road to Mount Wilson, arriving four or so hours later with a sandwich and water left in my water bottle at a parking lot near the radio television broadcasting towers and the complex of observatories that date back a century. There was only one vehicle in the parking lot and a few people enjoying the view at the top, with a patch of dirty leftover old snow along the southern edge, where a marker that noted the altitude at 5,500 feet. Brilliant sun shone across the mountain tops (Mount Lowe to the west, Mount Baldy to the east) emerging from a soft sea of white clouds like rocks in a Zen garden. The cloud cover had made the early hours of the hike very cool in a couple ways, as I ascended through fragrant misty oaks and pines.
9 miles back downhill was of course easier, sweeter because I knew by then that I’d have no problem with the ankle I’d broken a couple years earlier in the Stehekin River, in the North Cascades National Park, some 40 miles from my vehicle.
chocolate granite
A lifetime of electronic media, flat screens, movies, TV, books, music, the radio, news, the newspapers, pictures, photos, billboards, bumperstickers—all such things that produce us (even if, or as, we produce them), 24/7, day in and day out—dull the senses immensely. This stuff makes us retarded, it retards our reactions physically, spiritually and intellectually, it blurs, blunts and distorts our understanding of and feeling for the experiential, the actual and the real. Like any addict, I am in love with the fix because it works, it takes instant effect, I am in love with intelligence in any kind of medium, paper or plastic, electronic or 2-D. I got it going at all times of the day, at any given moment: music blasting, computers on, unread magazines scattered about, papers everywhere, artwork by friends and family on the walls and shelves, books piled everywhere, DVDs falling out of a basket by the TV, pictures on my flash drive and on my mind, telephone about to ring… Citified in who knows how many ways, penetrated and infiltrated, I find my only sure means of escape is by walking.
Walk away.
Walking is a form of resistance. You are not encapsulated by the steel vehicles which license your identity, you are not face first in a screen, you are not insulated behind glass, you are not listening to electronic voices beamed into your head. I have so far resisted carrying a cell phone precisely because then there’s no escape if you carry the various sorts of media accessible via the little screen in your pocket. Everywhere you go in an urban space, drivers are texting, drivers erratically proceed with phones clasped against their heads, people are trying to focus on buttons to punch, strollers advance oblivious to the day, verbalizing and spouting forth in the air, preoccupied persons are driven compulsively to check their cell phones at every opportunity for the next psychosocial twittering or voicemail to tell them what to think or to do. After a lifetime of resisting being a drone, I continue to resist being told what to do every hour, every minute, by little messages, by gangs of associates or random acquaintances, by people I already owe so much to, by my peers and by my betters, I am resisting final inroads into those last places where I actually am forced to reflect and think on my own experience and originate thought, as it happens, on walks.
Angel's Flight (gone again)
My sister Hannah and her husband Dave run Smallhouse Art Glass in Northern California where he makes art glass vases, bowls and art objects including squids and frogs that are sold at galleries and places like the Long Beach aquarium. They brought their sons, Marcus and Caius, to visit L.A. and had already been to Disneyland and the Norton Simon Museum, took in the L.A. Philharmonic production of Porgy and Bess at the Hollywood Bowl, went to the Alhambra cineplex for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as well as the Griffith Park Observatory where they saw myriad exhibits where they could press buttons to find out their weight on each planet of the solar system while simultaneously watching videos taken by space probes to distant planets and moons in outer space, as well as reclined on plush seats in the planetarium to view a digital laser program on astronomy, “Centered in the Universe,” projected against the inside of the great dome by “the most sophisticated star projector in the world, the Zeiss Universitarium Mark IX,” and had reservations (which I made for them on-line because my mother refuses to own a computer) for “Pompei and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples” at the L.A. County Museum of Art. In short, they were getting the pre-programmed and mediated version of experience of place which is produced for tourists everywhere (and so in that way homogenized, Disneyfied), with on-line reservations and computers and cell phones telling them where and when to go. However, Los Angeles is my home town and I believe after a lifetime of resisting capitalist ideological programming, consumerist dogma and my own preconceptions that it was my duty to treat them to some alternative to that experience, a Los Angeles you cannot purchase, undelivered in digital formats, not preserved behind glass, not virtual, instead—actually, strangely, real.
In short, I suggested we go on a walk.
Dave on the Gold Line
I know, practically unheard of in Los Angeles, slightly impractical in the 90 degree heat of July days, and—coming in at five to ten miles—more of a hike than a stroll. But, “real” in a way the touch-screen can’t touch. Unheard of, impractical, subversive—sun blasted streets, tarry pavements and long sidewalks, buildings and distinct neighborhoods, traffic and crowds, the real L.A. The Smallhouse family could bring their cell phones and digital cameras, but I was confident the actual city would render the virtual Matrix wholly secondary, subsidiary, derivative, an afterthought.
We left the van behind, parked a couple blocks from the Mission Street Gold Line station in South Pasadena—a couple blocks away because 2 and 3 hour parking zones aren’t sufficient for a walk that might take most of the day, given that my group of hikers might need to rest, might slow toward the end. Gold Line tickets are $1.25 one way, and even with a party of five, this is cheaper than all day parking in a downtown lot. Besides, it made us all pedestrians as soon as we took seats on the train and it left the platform. Escaping your own car is the necessary first prerequisite.
It feels old-fashioned, taking the Gold Line light rail into downtown Los Angeles. Like the red car trolleys and trains of the early 20th century, the Gold line follows an older route through Highland Park down the middle of Marmion Way, a residential street a block off Figueroa, where driveways open onto the street used by the train, where children bike and people stroll. Dave happened to be wearing a T-shirt featuring a block print image by Artemio Rodriguez, which I’d purchased at the Avenue 50 Gallery and I pointed out the gallery as the train scooted alongside it. At Marmion and Museum Way, the train stops at the Southwest Museum station—and I remarked on surviving century old Victorian houses hidden amidst palm trees and stucco box apartment blocks on the way and the “Casa de Adobe,” a 1920s reconstruction of an 1850s Californio adobe. A gray haired gent wearing a white plastic hard hat and a student’s backpack volunteered his own information, jumping into the conversation.
When Dave responded to the announcement, “Next stop, Chinatown,” by admitting he’d never seen L.A. Chinatown, I decided to add another mile or so onto our hike by getting off at the new Chinatown Station. Downstairs to the street shining in summer heat, across College into a two story maze of junk, trinket and dry goods stalls, a rats warren of a market, endless baubles and knick knacks for sale, from pots and pans to plastic AK-47s “in case you want to get shot by police,” knock-off clothing and souvenir T-shirts for $2 each. Stacks of T-shirts with Michael Jackson or “Hollywood,” on them, “Lakers,” or I love San Francisco,” “I Love Los Angeles,” “California,” or “I [heart] NY.” Mickey Mouse steering wheel covers ($8) and live turtles ($5). My party began enjoying shopping, and I didn’t even have to mention that some stalls in this market sold the most potent (if illegal) insecticide chalk. We went east across Broadway by the stone lions at doorways to various “benevolent association” headquarters, and walked through the Chinese gate to the Central Plaza and Gin Ling Way, which I suggested they’d recognize if they visualized it in movies or car commercials, sprayed with water and diffused at night by steam or smoke, the bad guys entering from one end and advancing on the protagonists. This late summer morning, Chinese dudes sat on folding chairs under big umbrellas in the plaza hunched over board games. Across from the Mountain Bar, part of the new Chinatown scene with literary readings and a hipster crowd, I handed out pennies to toss into the fortune fountain, with its waters splashing on cups marked “LUCK,” “MONEY,” HEALTH,” “indecipherable,” etc., and although all five of us tried pitching pennies at every cup in sight, none of us made a penny into any—perhaps because we already have all we need?
View from City Hall east
Across Hill to Chun King Road, I showed them the new Gallery row where “people from the west side” (read: white) bought out failing or dusty old mom and pop junk stores and trinket shops and remodeled them into new art galleries—gentrification if you want to call it that, but one that brings a new generation of people, customers, cash, new energy and new life into the neighborhood. Little Asian girls pushed their scooters up and down the otherwise quiet and empty Chun King Road. The art crowd doesn’t show up until the evenings, and till then the neighborhood is still full of multigenerational Vietnamese and Chinese families. We peeked into a couple galleries, then I led the group through a greasy back alley where the Calarts crowd converges in a basement called Betalevel for readings and music, down College and across Alameda to Homeboy Industries Headquarters, where we lunched at the Homegirl Cafe.
Marcus in Philippe's
Patricia Zarate, her white hair short, who started Homegirl Cafe a couple incarnations back in the direction of Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights was chatting with friends at the next table, but I don’t think that’s why service was particularly good. Some days are just good days for the homegirls cooking up a storm behind the counter and for us, chowing down on their sandwiches and tacos, nine kinds of tacos like beef tinga with pickled onion, carnitas with minced green apple, celantro green turkey chorizo. Hannah bought a chocolate brown (cream-colored lettering: Homegirl) T-shirt in the souvenir shop (next to the full bakery case) for one of her Chicana activist friends. The waiting room in the bottom floor of Homeboy Industries was full of restless black and brown street encrypted youths, waiting for referrals and counseling, working their way of out that life.
Cal Trans building west from City Hall
A block west we walked in the rear door of Phillipe’s Original French Dipped Sandwiches, just to give them a glimpse of the next luncheon choice up the street, with the crowd lined before the counter where countergirls in their aprons carve the meat and the long tables stand amid sawdust scattered on the cement floor. Old school! I pointed out to the boys the row of telephone booths along the wall near the cigarette stand: “You may not recognize these things, and this may be your last chance to see them. Check them out. They are called telephone booths and they were once common across the United States.” Caius stepped into one ands his mother snapped a shot of him holding the telephone to his head. Marcus stepped into one and his mother snapped a shot of him holding his cell phone to an ear.
Westering, across Cesar Chavez at Alameda (kitty-corner to Terminal Annex Post Office, which offered 24 hour postal service for generations but no longer, and across the street from a particularly ugly heap of new “luxury condos” which block out the 1939 Union Station “colonial revival” train station), we worked our way up Olvera Street, that tourist trap which previously had featured as the rundown empty setting for street scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 short, “The Kid” (according to wikipedia), and was officially renovated in 1930 as a civic and commercial project by a woman named Christine Sterling, with the backing of Harry Chandler of the L.A. Times. Marcus located a Betty Boop belt buckle to his liking in one of the stalls and Caius tried out two plastic pistols, one in each hand, which when the trigger was pulled, played music and spun either a revolving basketball or baseball on the muzzle, which as the music played, opened to reveal a spinning basketball player or baseball player. Certainly I regret that I did not buy one of those pistols now! Sometimes objects of great value look like the purest trash.
We crossed the placita by the mission-era 1861 chapel under the great ficus trees, crossed over the 101 freeway with its bumper to bumper northboard traffic crawling at perhaps ten miles an hour (several hours later when we returned, the traffic was exactly the same) and I suggested that we must wave at the traffic and laugh, and walked past the Federal court house to try to enter City Hall for a look around (“Mayor Villaraigosa grew up in City Terrace, too, you know, but he did not answer my letter asking what the old address for his childhood home had been. He must have bitter memories…”). The guards at the door with their metal detectors and X-ray machine rejected us because Dave carries a big folding knife. So we went outside and Dave stashed the knife in the shrubbery and we went back inside and took the elevators, three of them in succession, up to the top of the building. At the 27th floor you can climb the stairs past a bronze bust of Tom Bradley (his predecessor, Republican Sam Yorty, called Bradley a communist during the campaign), to the large empty Tom Bradley room, a big meeting or banquet hall with an immense high ceiling and windows all around. The room was full of tables and chairs with a podium and microphone at the front of the room, where I improvised a short speech welcoming everyone to City Hall. In fact, as we (skittishly, some of us) went outdoors on the walkway outside that runs around each side of the building and you can stand in the breeze at the railing and look out over the smoggy city in four directions, we were the only visitors to the top of the building the entire time we were there, except for one young office worker with her city hall ID badge pinned to her blouse, who apparently was looking for a quiet, private place to smoke. We circled the building a couple times while I pointed out landmarks such as Dodger Stadium, General Hospital and the El Sereno hills to the east, the Disney Opera Hall atop Bunker Hill to the north, and architect Thom Mayne’s futuristic steel-skinned Caltrans Building and the old L.A. Times building to the west. Hannah took digital pictures of the views in all directions.
City Hall
Continuing north from City Hall, we crossed the lawn in welcome ficus shade of muggy summer, strolled past the Rockefeller plaza-stolid facade of the 1935 L.A.Times building with fascist-style eagles flanking the front doorway, and the words “Truth/ Liberty Under the Law” on the one side, “Equal Rights/ True Industrial Freedom,” on the other. I commented that for the original owner Otis Chandler, like the Rockefellers, that meant no unions for workers, selling out to the Chicago Tribune, massive lay-offs and eventual bankruptcy for the newspaper. We hiked First Street uphill to the Disney Opera Hall, which Dave admired for Frank Gehry’s sculptural extravagance in stainless steel. The front doors were locked, so we went round the back to the garden, which was full of groups of foreign teenage tourists lounging, posing, shooting photos. We strolled through the crowd of kids speaking Hebrew or Greek or Hungarian, down the steps on the other side of the building, and out along Grand Avenue, in the shadows of immense bank skyscrapers and tall condo towers. The skyscrapers towering above MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art and California Plaza cause a wind tunnel effect, which on a blazing hot day is nice enough. Dave stepped to corner of the severe sharp edge of the blade-like Wells Fargo bank building, sheathed in chocolate granite, and looked straight up.
Crossed to Hope, and down the Library (or Bunker Hill) Steps (Hannah shot the Robert Graham female nude statue atop the fountain that squirts the cascade that runs down the center of the steps)—across West 5th, and into the bustling Central Library where Charles Bukowski discovered the work of John Fante, and Fante did important work as well as Carlos Bulosan, and then some pyro-arsonist set it on fire in 1986. We escalated up to the balcony at the top of the great eight story atrium, where everyone could use the restrooms and get a drink of cold water, not to mention cool off and enjoy the terrific air conditioning after walking all the way from Chinatown. I mentioned I ran a writing workshop out of the library once for six months. We looked at the library visitors, most of them young, all kinds, really, scruffy and studious, business-like and wild, going about their intellectual duties. I noted there were art exhibits (usually photography, this time by Paul Outerbridge) to see in the galleries in the building. A quick perusal of the gift shop off the central foyer, and we were off again south on 5th Street, alongside the Biltmore Hotel, which I couldn’t recognize from the back when Dave asked me what it was, down to the once dull and sun-stricken and full of winos but now terribly ugly (after remodeling) Pershing Square, full of people getting on the bus, businessmen, tourists, citizens of the city, citizens of the day. Young tourists, students, hurried all about downtown, maps or guidebooks or cameras in hand, talking quizzically about where they might be going, I’m sure. French, Korean, German or Dutch, all young, traipsing around with their lives in their hands, having adventures. I glanced at them going by with envy as we crossed from street corners. Did the weather-beaten and torn up alcoholics strewn along the benches at the base of Bunker Hill register us in the same way? People with their lives in hand, rushing about through the broad daylight, doing whatever they wished, free?
At Pershing Square (5th & Hill) they installed an Automated Public Toilet for $250,000, which resembles a green oblong tube sticking out of the ground like an ornate green steamship smokestack, and I saw a homeless guy enter to use it, urinating as the door rotated closed behind him. The Downtown News notes, “Each APT’s oval-shaped kiosk contains a small toilet and a sink. After every use, the door shuts and the toilet retracts into a behind-the-scenes cleaning area, where it is pressure-washed, disinfected and dried. Meanwhile, the unit’s floor and sink are pressurized with water and drained. The toilet bowl swings back around and is ready for use again within minutes. While some APTs cost 25 cents per use, the Skid Row facilities are free.” Nearby, two bicycle mounted cops wearing shorts and bike helmets listened to a homeless man.
Crossing Hill, below the immobilized Angel’s Flight Funicular draped in orange industrial netting and closed down in 2001 after it malfunctioned, crashed, killing an elderly tourist, we always look at the funicular wistfully because Dolores first lived in tenements on Bunker Hill when she came from Mexico, and took the funicular in its previous location, when Bunker Hill was actually a much taller hill full of old SRO old men’s hotels. That was the ghost city I recall from my father’s time, when we would visit him and he lived in furnished rooms in buildings which announced, in paint peeling off the brick, “hot water, shower and bath, fully furnished” or “rooms $10, monthly rates.” The current old folks residential towers and luxury condos on Bunker Hill bear no relation, except to evoke ghosts. For stories of that Bunker Hill neighborhood life, see John Fante’s stories and his 1939 novel, Ask the Dust. Across Hill we entered Grand Central Market, straight to the juice bar with its metal juice machine which has served all kinds of juice from carrot to pomegranate, from cherry to garlic, from celery to strawberry, for generations. I had pomegranate, Caius a cherry smoothie, Marcus a frozen coffee drink, and Dave a root beer float.
Caius at Grand Central Market
Of course into the market (dating to 1917), concrete floor strewn with sawdust, neon lights glowing in the dim piping and ducts of the high ceiling over the produce, confection, and cooked food stalls. Voices and street sounds reverberating inside the deepness of the open building from Hill Street to Broadway. The stalls have changed a lot over the years, and now, clearly, Centroamericanos and Mexicanos have made the market largely their own, with a few others, Koreans selling fried food, Chinese women waiting beside their massage tables, practically asleep under a big banner, “CHINESE MASSAGE.” There’s a 99 Cents store in the basement. I’ve never wandered through the whole establishment. It was one of those places our parents frequented. Dolores’s dad figured it was his duty as a Mexicano to barter with the vendors, arguing about the price, quality and worth of their produce. He used to bring home wilted, crummy old vegetables, proud he’d stood up to the cheap vendors; they couldn’t cheat him! Nowadays you can get a whole fried fish with some rice or French fries for a couple dollars, but who knows how long those fish sit under the overhead lamps. There’s gotta be some good eateries in all those stalls somewhere.
“The Million Dollar Movie Theater,” one of the big empty movie theaters on Broadway is next door; dad took us to see movies here when we were kids and he was living in an empty storefront on Wabash, years after he and mom had split up and he was in town from Central America or the merchant marine—maybe this theater was one my grandmother played keyboard or organ in as a teenager during silent movies, her job was to perform the soundtrack on sheet music, before she married my grandfather and they moved to the Bay Area because he (Long Beach chief of police) thought L.A. was “too dangerous” in the 1920s. They had lived in South Central when it was all white. Ah, what Los Angeles was that? Typically, no teenagers are interested at all in this type of information, but I feel bound to point out these traces of their ancestors as we go down the sidewalk. Cross Broadway at 3rd, I held open the door to the Bradbury Building, so they can check out the wrought iron grillwork, the 1893 architecture in the five story atrium lit by the skylight they’ve seen in numerous movies like Chinatown and Blade Runner, those movies most emblematic of the city. We can’t play in the two elevators, kids in one, adults in the other, chasing each other up and down the floors; the security would kick us out, the upper floors are LAPD Offices of Internal Affairs. It was all pretty quiet on a Thursday afternoon. The Smallhouses located a life-size bronze statue of Charlie Chaplin on a bench at the other entrance to the building and snapped pictures beside him. “Why is that here?” Marcus asked.
There is no why.
Bradbury Building
Outside, with a cop looking the other way, the teenagers and I ran across 3rd into the parking lot and stood directly underneath one of the best murals in L.A., “the Pope of Broadway,” Eloy Torrez’s 8 story tall portrait of Anthony Quinn on the side of the Victor Clothing Company. I’d never seen the mural up this close before. We could touch his shoes. Up close, the brush strokes were wild and energetic. I could see the paint was peeling and sun-faded. Next to it, partially hidden by another brick commercial building from the previous century, appeared a mural of a flying horseman by Frank Romero that reminded me of the expressionist style of Carlos Almaraz. He was a terrific painter who died of AIDS in 1989, and Romero’s mural is ghostly, stripped and blasted by the weather of decades, almost entirely faded and gone. With their mom taking photos of us from the other side of 3rd street, the boys didn’t notice this secret mural; it’s just another ghost I saw from the corner of my eye—there’s one almost everywhere I look.
Down 3rd, left on Main Street, past the alley where the entrance to the Smell is located (where I had to park outside, waiting to pick up my daughter and her teen friends in the middle of the night), to the corner of 2nd (Santa Vibiana’s where Dolores went to Catholic school when she lived on Bunker Hill, now it’s been sold to a private developer, who will turn the church into a party or banquet hall), 2nd to Los Angeles Street where we crossed to the New Otani Hotel, enjoying the blast of air conditioning in the ritzy huge lobby with its grand piano and eateries, I held the door to the elevator for them. I took them out on the 4th floor garden level, but it’s been ruined—it used to be quiet little oasis of a Japanese garden several floors above the pavement and street noise, but the garden’s been taken over by restaurants, which set tables and chairs on the grass, lounge chairs and speaker systems on the pathways, and instead of the babbling brook only there’s lame disco lounge music. We walked through Little Tokyo down 2nd Street (we’ve been through here so many times and it’s so old now that it feels like “our town”), and the Japanese American National Museum was having a Thursday free day, but the kids were burnt out on museums so we skipped it, besides the famous Kogi Korean barbecue taco truck isn’t around so there’s less incentive. We strolled through the pedestrian alley behind the East West Theater, which used to be Union Church where they sent us when we were kids for our Christianity and Japanese Americanization, before we returned to East L.A. I still remember the old lady clothing rack and toiletries smell of that old church.
Nobody stops at the ugly monument to the 442nd World War 2 all JA regiment (anyway it’s not the ugliest war memorial around, we’ve seen worse) as we moved east along Alameda, fire engines spinning their light bars in front of the U.S. Metro Detention Center “downtown Hilton” jail whose tiny windows never open. Crossing over the 101 freeway (bumper to bumper traffic still, hours later), we strode through the high-ceilinged hall of Union Station, with the tables of the upscale restaurant Traxx cordoned off on the left and the postcard rack at the snack stand and people enjoying drinks at the bar to the right, and all kinds of travelers resting in the great old comfortable leather seats in the great space and golden afternoon light. The crowd was streaming through, lines waiting for Amtrak trains, but we headed upstairs to the Gold Line, jumping aboard the last car and zooming in snaky curves all along the Arroyo Seco, standing till we got some seats, and off at Mission Station, where we negotiated the crowd at the South Pasadena farmer’s market, and my sister and her husband picked out peaches and nectarines.
As we walked through the muggy late afternoon light of a summer’s day, toward the vehicle and other machines we would shortly wire or otherwise attach to our selves, we had weariness in our toes, we had perspiration in the fine hairs of the skin, we had peaches, plums and nectarines, we had the day away in the real L.A.—not to mention the ghost city of the past and all the ghosts we might conversate with on street corners tangential to the moment.
Photographs by Hannah Smallhouse
where endive is heard to speak
—You waste your time looking in the mirror.
—You waste your time talking to those people.
—You waste your life sleeping, tying your shoes, trying to wake up.
—You waste your life shitting, chewing, looking at papers.
—You waste your life dreaming, scheming, worrying, scratching yourself.
—Organ pipe cactus watches eternity from the gravel slope.
—Carrot feels the whole universe wheel through ever-expanding night.
—Cottonwood wafts seeds into the wild atmosphere.
—Your friend comes over, his beautiful wife killed the year before in SUV rollover.
—He says he’s doing all right, but he’s all keyed up, he can’t relax.
—Your wife’s friend is over, young Colombian, fresh and dark.
—Your friend is interested, he sits up, gives her his full attention.
—Your wife’s friend is put off, she has enough problems with her boyfriend.
—They will break up again soon for the final time.
—Then you will lose touch with them.
—Humans waste their lives vibrating all this radiation.
—You could be fresh endive, curling green above dark earth.
The East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines conducts environmental impact surveys and atmospheric survey investigations, reports or insults, as part of on-going business, and presented below are possibly helpful findings on cloud formations you may encounter in your area.
Impending (or sometimes called Inciting) Clouds: These clouds denote ashes swirling from burnt hillsides of narratives--- denote repetitive thought patterns frequenting isolated individuals --- denote myths flushed through deteriorated porous ideologies, saline, mineralized.
Mammatous or Bilactial Storm Clouds: These clouds denote gradual movement of a low front across a basin or plain, with tiny figures in the distance suffering ill luck or worse, magnified by grandiose indifference of universal aspects and surrounding life forms such as crows, ants, telephone poles, and mailboxes.
Aspired Ichthyous Cloud: This cloud type denotes existential vagaries like worrisome impulsiveness of tropical origin moving on land, typically ashore Southwestern or Gulf of Mexico and continuing on through hybridized family branches sheeted in cold light.
Carina Cloud: This cloud denotes wild happy beauty swirling through oxygenated wafting currents that loop through doldrums, through skirmishes, through anything--- and rattle your bones, purifying our lives, to use a figure of speech. Hard on radio transmissions.
Invisible Clouds: These clouds (shown here on Mars) denote recurrent psychological states involving intractable metaphysical defense mechanisms and complex aesthetic symptoms resulting in possible personal injury, casualties, or really outstanding unforgettable dramatic gestures. Invisible turbulence of a high order.
Dust Haze of History: These clouds denote the limit of your gaze when you stand at the edge of time and forgetfulness, last late light of afternoon fading against the back wall of the retinae, unrepentant dreams flat and immobile, waiting for birds.
Norte (sometimes called Marisela's) Clouds: These clouds are variegated and smoky, with highlights of of subconscious earthiness, berries and pepper, lingering traces of jazzy evenings or pungent phrasing. Composite flourescences.
Oceanic (sometimes called Land's End) Clouds: These clouds denote transcendence wanted and unwanted, realized or unrealized, dreamt or undreamt, happiness of fishes, joys of birds, myriad unknown lives beyond all imagining, unknown, way out there!
O'Sullivan's Mist (sometimes called TB Mist): These clouds denote the drift of experience, coruscation of memory on bent decaying frames of event, ebb and flow of cause and effect under ragged leaves or obscured stars.
Loser's Clouds: These clouds denote lost causes backed by everyone and anyone at any time, at some point, on the street corner in brilliant day or in despair before dawn. Arises from the breath of the innocent, at last.
Hydro-electric or Fiduciary Clouds: These clouds denote energy fluctuations at great heights throughout all levels of the social system, redistribution of wealth from the poorest to the richest actioning banal desires and utmost greed while driving the entire body politic into collective hypocrisy, withering shame, destruction of untold lives. Rotten polluted defeats follow after.
Roiling Clouds of Time: These clouds denote the moment arising, the moment falling, simultaneous, hard to nail down, how to express it, the lack of imagination or insight or any way to express it that happens to anyone, sometimes. Look up.
Shoshone Clouds (sometimes called Snake River Clouds): These clouds denote evanescent grace limned by rough terrain, powers of description beggared by inimitable Taoist salience, or silence. Clouds that waft downward into the ground and disappear. Not as rare as once thought.
Wooshy or Swooshy Clouds: These clouds denote stratospheric systems often derided for their lack of definition or destructive capability, but occuring as they regularly do in areas of calm or torpor, the deleterious aspects of puffy softness like transfatty acids is usually overlooked. At one's peril, if anyone cared. Look up!
Chronological (sometimes called Orthopaedic) Clouds: These clouds denote breakage and tearing of the fabric of time, rent by unseen forces like 400 Palestinian children blown apart or shot in Gaza by Israeli Defense Forces and the strange silence ensuing (and when Amos Tutuola's protagonist meets hundreds of children on the road to the Dead's Town in The Palm-Wine Drinkard he witnesses their terrible force), ensuing silence, ensuing silence for us all.
This Fierce and Beautiful World and Other Stories
Brought to you by (Arnoldo Garcia)
Maria Alexandrovna Platonova, the writer’s widow, held out the tattered notebook, but warned me:”Only you must return it straight away. Look through it, and then I’ll give you another….”Not out of mistrust of me, but because she knew the real worth of those little books.”When you glance through them,” she told me, “you can see how the notes were made, and what the conditions were like: in haste, on the move, anyhow–the thing being to catch a striking thought on the wing, or jot down something worth recording. Some of the scribbling pads and notebooks are badly torn, with traces of mud from the trenches. You feel they shared some rough journeys with their owner. Those are Platonov’s wartime travelling companions. He was a war correspondent, and toured the front line on many of the fighting fronts in the last war. When he was mulling over some idea for a story, Andrei loved doodling. I found electric circuit diagrams in several scribbling pads. He drew them when he was working on a story. Who knows, maybe that’s when he wrote his tales of the nineteen twenties—“The Homeland of Electricity” and “Lenin’s Lamp”—the ones known to every schoolboy and girl now. Incidentally, he built country power stations with his own hands, worked on reservoirs in the dry areas, was an engineer, and he really knew his blueprints and formulas.”Ordinary little scribbling pads, little books in worn covers…. But no dates. They were his constant life companions.”I managed to rescue them,” says Maria Alexandrovna. “I have about fifty of them here…. But he used to reproach me: ‘What are you keeping them for?…’ “”What are you keeping them for?…” Maria Alexandrovna now literally has to restore with the aid of a magnifying glass what was, for him, only the “raw material for future works.” Whenever he was working on something, he seldom resorted to his jottings, although some entries went into his tales and stories almost word for word. Platonov wrote in one of his notebooks: “It would be strange to publish anything ‘From the Notebooks,’ because one mustn’t feed the reader with the raw material; it’s a mark of disrespect for the reader and arrogance on the writer’s part.” The publication of excerpts from the notebooks will not seem strange today. The reader values all parts of the heritage left by a writer of great talent.–Nikolai Tyulpinov
* * *
Wisdom lacks only time–eternity. It sees everything just in a moment of a brief time-span. Hence, from the length of history comes insufficient wisdom.
* * *
… The locals welcome the soldiers with honey, bread and strawberries. Seventy-year-old Marfa Mezenina has come out of the forest with her daughter and three grandchildren. Her son-in-law is in the Red Army. Marfa has spent eight months in the forest. She and the children are dirty and ragged. They hid corn in a grave and set up a cross on it. The sack rotted, but the grain survived. It hibernated, but didn’t die.
* * *
Work is conscience.
* * *
… To change life, to transform it into a happy future, one must, from the very beginning of the struggle, have the seed of this future within one as an element of personal character, even though it is hidden from sight….
* * *
… a cemetery for those killed in the war. And what should have been accomplished, but never was, comes to life: creativeness, work, achievement, love–the whole picture of what might have been, of life unfulfilled. To depict what was really destroyed–not just bodies. The great canvas of life and of lost souls, possibilities.
* * *
The highest expression of the people’s drama is their battle with the foe for existence.
* * *
The dead remain at the same eternal age at which they died.
* * *
A soldier in hospital, badly wounded, talks to his dead comrades at night. “The dead can give the best advice. Why? They’re impartial.”
* * *
After the war, when a memorial is erected in this land to the eternal glory of the soldiers, another memorial should be built facing it to the eternal memory of the martyrs among our people. The walls of this memorial should bear the names of tottering old men, women, and babes in arms. They likewise met their deaths at the hands of mankind’s executioners.
* * *
The truth is a mystery, always a mystery. There are no obvious truths.
* * *
Gain strength from adversity.
* * *
Old age: “I do so wish somebody would take out my bones, wash them in brine, and put them together again, I’m so tired, tired to the very marrow….”
* * *
Two people: one leads in difficult, the other in easy times. Only the first is loved and adored as by right.
* * *
Don’t confuse yourself with humanity!
* * *
Man learns nothing from pleasure.
* * *
Love for a child is love for the well-spring of your own heart.
* * *
Children (little ones) are equally “given” to living and not living. This is their principal charm: in defenselessness, in unconcern. The description of this spiritual condition makes up the whole of children’s literature.
* * *
Children are all intelligent persons. The great lie is to look down on them; they’re shrewd, amazing, observant folk.
* * *
Art consists in expressing what is most complicated by the most simple means. It is the highest form of economy.
* * *
The truth has a great failing: it regards itself as a blessing, and wants at all costs to become common property.
* * *
Good demands infinitely more energy and time than evil. That is why the good is difficult. The good man never has enough time, but the evil one achieves his ends with ease.
* * *
The drama of a great and simple life. A little boy aged two or three walks weeping round an empty wooden table in a poor flat. He misses his father, but his father is lying in a trench, under fire, and there are tears of longing in his eyes; he claws the earth out of grief for his son, who is far away and who, barefoot, half-starved, abandoned, is weeping for him on this grey day.
* * *
Art cannot abide a vacuum–it must be filled with life and people, as a meadow with grasses.
* * *
The moon like a knight-at-arms over the world!
* * *
He would bend down and pick up a lump of soil from the road and throw it into the field, so that it could germinate the grain and not be trampled uselessly to dust underfoot.
* * *
The cricket lived under the porch many a summer and sang there at eventide; perhaps it was the same cricket that sang the year before last, perhaps his grandson….
* * *
The little boy, weak with hunger, was listless and half asleep. The schoolmistress brought him two pancakes, and he ate them. After that he answered all the questions perfectly.
* * *
“When I see someone on the tram who looks like me, I get off.”
* * *
If you live true to your spirit, your heart, by achievement, sacrifice, and duty, then there won’t be any problems, and there won’t be any yearning for immortality and so forth. All these things come from an uneasy conscience.
* * *
Where else does what is good and noble come from, but from doing, from straining one’s utmost, from self-sacrifice?
* * *
Two kinds of old men: the first grow old and conduct themselves like the ancients in Pushkin; the others are eternally youthful, ageless scamps.
* * *
It’s easy to love a woman, for it means loving yourself.
* * *
A man doesn’t know himself, he must be discovered by the writer.
(Selected and published by Maria Platonova)
Translated by Alex Miller
From “Soviet Literature”, 1973, Vol. 6, Moscow, Writer’s Union of the USSR.
Andrei Platonov (Andrei P. Kliemtov) 1899 - 1951
Roque Dalton 1935 - 1975
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9gno7_roque-dalton-buscandome-liosvoz-de_shortfilms
another excellent bilingual edition from Curbstone Press
see also: http://www.curbstone.org/bookdetail.cfm?BookID=71
Julio Cortazar, 1914 - 1984
East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines 
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