The Ferris Wheel

Jane is sucking on her bottom lip. She does this when she is concentrating or afraid. When Jane was 8 her father fell off a cliff when he was hiking with her mother. He reached down for his water canister, slipped under the stiff afternoon sun. Jane has been scared of heights and the dry stare of scarecrows ever since. The ferris wheel was my idea.

Sitting in the lap of a fresh cut moon, our knees graze and my bones firework. Jane of the lemonade sweat, the bicycle eyes, the pear shampoo that turns me harlequin skinned. Our mothers say we are too young for bras. I see Jane’s nipples through her shirt and feel a fuse flicker in the deep sea of my stomach. A small fish swimming fast. A warm, wet fish breathing blood through the gills, growing a hot flood in my gut.
Our chair sways, rocking us to and fro. The tiny feet of Jane’s breath skip over me like a stone on water. I want to make a scarf out of her sighs, wear it like a noose. Jane’s knuckles whiten over the metal bar. I place my hand over hers. Her wrists are so small, they are smaller than the stars spilling silver on our faces and I am a full cup of truth, trembling.

*

Heights make me thirsty. I think of the stilted man in the giraffe mask, if he is ever scared of falling. The sound of stilts in soil much like the thud of wet firewood, the spit of splinters and tear of grass a lot louder underground. If he were to fall I would not hear it, trapped in the microwave music of the ferris wheel, spinning slowly.

The chair in front of us holds two lovers. She wraps herself around him like a glossy snake. She has been found by something that has not yet found me. He can smell it in her, it lives in the crease of her neck, that secret cave where he goes. I imagine I am an island, waiting to be discovered. He will be the one to explore me, sinking his fingers into my sand, turning my rocks over gently, claiming I am his.
We are at the highest point now, in line with the spine of the sky, dangling like a bright gem from night’s black neck. My ankles hang over a mess of rainbow machinery, of sticky fists and electric laughter. I am too close to the edge. There is a desert in my throat, a cactus crying. Violet puts her hand on mine and I watch the couple in front. One day soon, I will drop from these metal branches and burst.

By Amy Woodside | Posted in Art, Nonfiction | Tagged , | Comments (0)

A Rake’s Progress

There’s a story that English artist David Hockney tells of the occasion on which his mother came to visit soon after he had relocated to Los Angeles in 1978. Hockney was born in Bradford, a West Yorkshire city that’s a little smaller than Cleveland, Ohio, and possessed of a similar degree of glamour and cultural pedigree. He was born into a working-class family, in 1937, and he explains that when his mother gazed out from his Hollywood Hills home at the beautiful clear blue skies of Southern California, what she found unable to fathom was the fact that no-one was taking advantage of the wonderful climate by hanging out their laundry to dry.

It’s a story that gently illustrates Hockney’s remarkable journey. Certainly, you’d have difficulty unearthing a role model for the artist from his Bradford youth. As Christopher Simon Sykes makes clear in A Rake’s Progress (part one of a planned two-volume biography), Hockney is unique, a character of his own invention.

David Hockney’s clear and obvious talent gained him early entry him to The Royal Academy of Arts in London, and he shot to fame immediately upon leaving art school in the early-Sixties. His work during that decade was political in the sense that from the beginning he used his work as a means of declaring his homosexuality. Perhaps it’s a little strange then that while he was busy announcing his homosexuality to the world at large, he was apparently neglecting to share the fact with his parents – and with his mother in particular, with whom he was especially close. After seeing Jack Hazan’s 1974 documentary film, A Bigger Splash, shot during Hockney’s break-up with long-term lover Peter Schlesinger, Laura Hockney confided to her diary:
‘It was rather a shock…. At first it did not hit me – I guess I am very naïve – tho I’m not quite ignorant. I am very surprised David has allowed himself to be filmed in these private corners of his life, whatever he feels about it.’

Not that it altered Laura’s devotion to her son any. Equally unsurprising was the reaction of Hockney’s father, Kenneth – classically dour Yorkshire, and in this instance, monosyllabic. He declared the film ‘muck.’

What’s most striking about Hockney as we meet him here is his inquisitive nature, particularly as viewed through his unquenchable thirst for travel. Today we tend to take journeys across countries and continents for granted, but at a time when it was considerably more difficult and unusual to do so, Hockney travelled constantly across Europe and America. And as soon as he had the means, he lived for extended periods in New York, Los Angeles and Paris.

These varied landscapes in Hockney’s life prove a boon for the purposes of Sykes’s book, as do the colorful art world characters engaged by the artist: the writer Christopher Isherwood and his lover, Don Bachardy; the flamboyant theatre and film director, Tony Richardson; the great poet W.H. Auden (an uncomfortable sitter for a Hockney portrait. Of his weathered features, Hockney was given to wonder ‘If his face looks like that, what must his balls look like?’).

It’s difficult to recall an unfavorable impression of Hockney from the entire narrative, but then, A Rake’s Progress adheres to a biographical mode that follows chronology rather than critical analysis. No great time is spent raising a cultural backdrop, and considering the size of the project, there is relatively little in the way of extended observation of Hockney’s art. What Sykes does, instead – and does very well – is provide a palpable sense of the man himself. Hockney is revealed here as flamboyant and gregarious, loyal and witty, keenly intuitive and supremely devoted to his craft. He’s good company, and so, in turn, is the book.

When Progress ends, Hockney is thirty-eight years old, and mostly recovered from the traumatic end of his affair with Schlesinger (an event described by Sykes as ‘the first really painful thing that had ever happened to him.’ Those who wonder about the existence of art without angst might do well to consider Hockney). Ahead lay the years in Hollywood, the vast Grand Canyon paintings, and the formal experiments with photo-collage and computer technology (Hockney is a leading proponent of I-Pad art, utilizing the ‘Brushes’ application).

The current Hockney exhibition at The Royal Academy of Arts, A Bigger Picture, is the draw of the season in London, and it cements a kind of homecoming. Hockney returned to Yorkshire in 2005, making it his primary home once more. It will be worth following Sykes through volume two of his biography to find out exactly how he got there, and all that happened in between.

David Hockney: A Rake’s Progress- The Biography by Christopher Simon Sykes will be released on April 17th.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is up at The Royal Academy of Art in London through April 9th.

Top Image: iPad drawing by David Hockney.

By John Davidson | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Frank The Dart

When the poet Frank Bidart came to speak at my father’s memorial service in New Brunswick, New Jersey, I was touched. Bidart had been my father’s favorite student at The University of Riverside in California and was often the subject of dinner-table conversation. After moving to New Jersey, where my Mayflower father taught at Rutgers, we’d periodically receive phone calls from the man Louise Glück called “one of the greatest poets of our time.” One day a babysitter informed my parents that she’d received a sinister phone call: “I think he said his name was Frank the Dart!!!” Which became a family joke for decades. Sure does sound like some underworld figure. But there is nothing underworldy about Frank Bidart’s poetry. Take for instance these otherwordly opening lines from For the Twentieth Century:

Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand
Technologies of ecstasy

Boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water
Rises without boundaries,

I push the PLAY button:–

Or the universal minutiae (and elusiveness) of the poem “The Poem Is a Veil”:

V E I L,–as if silk that you in fury must thrust repeatedly
High at what the eye, your eye, naked cannot see

Catches, clinging to it’s physiognomy.

Hence, it’s no mistake that Bidart’s work Music Like Dirt (2002) became the first chapbook to ever become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. (It now makes up part 1 of Star Dust.) Bidart’s work achieves an originality and breadth of scope that is dizzying in its implications. His emotional depth is matched only by the brilliance of his poem’s semi-immaculate conception. I won’t pretend to be a formal scholar of poetical techniques (I can’t tell a dactyl from a spondee), but I can safely say that this is the most readable collection of modern poetry I’ve ever leafed through. It makes an excellent X-mas gift for anytime in the new century, and might indeed in the future be used for making “evolved” peace with colonizing immigrants from the outer planets who say with an alien warcry, “This Bud Is For You!”

Nominated for the National Book Award, Star Dust is a must to chuck in your Amazon.com cart. It both reaches out into the cosmos like Steven Hawking and withdraws inward like The Incredible Shrinking Man. Bidart says he hoped to make a sequence “In which the human need to make is seen as not only central but inescapable,“ a celestial tapestry seen in the context of other processes—sexuality, mortality—and inseparable from it. Clearly Bidart is on the make himself, but it is hard to figure out what direction he’s going in before a surprise enjambment wakes us up. In Little Fugue, for example, we have a haunting lilting melody worthy of a young Mozart: “beneath every journey the ticket to this/journey in one direction.” Or in “In Luggage” there is the hint of unconsummated sexuality: “In your stray moments, as now in/mine, may what was not/rise like grief before you.” Here we have the urge to create and destroy united like polar opposites, or a couple who love each other to death in a classical domestic dispute. In Advice to the Players, the rules of the game are set forth in Bidart’s definition of a human being: “We are creatures who need to make.”
This takes extreme form in the first section’s end poem, Lament for the Makers:

Until my mother died she struggled to make
A house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me

Many creations must

Make, but only one must seek
Within itself what to make

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

*

Teach me, master who by making were
Remade, your art

Bidart’s fantastical book, reminiscent of Italo Calvino on shrooms and divided into 2 parts, continues with a “Curse” where “Each time you enter them/they spit you out. The dead find you are not food.” The “you” addressed in the poem is–at least when we ask Frank outright “whom” he means–whomever brought down the World Trade Center, though the poem can be read on many other different levels. Since I was born on 11/9, the 9/11 timing of the terrorism seems the topsy-turvy stuff of rank nightmares and emergency rooms. We all feel numb from numerology. And then there is my personal favorite, Phenomenology of the Prick, one of the best titles of a poem I can think of—with its hint of sexual games gone awry: “You make sure/I see how hard/your wife makes it . . .” Bidart’s humor is both ferocious and farcical; there is more here than meets the eye. Experience and imagination collide, like worlds and words.

What really makes “Star Dust” move, though, is the semi-epic longpoem called The Third Hour of the Night, a powerful autobiographical monologue of sorts attributed to the Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini, sculptor of Perseus With Head of Medusa. Set in a believable historical context, the poem describes the dual aspects of both sublime creation and destructive energy. Throwing everything into the forge—including cutlery—Cellini finds, “Days later, when the bronze had cooled, when the clay/sheath had been with great care removed I found/what was dead brought back to life again.”
In effect, the Promethian Bidart says through his soullmate Cellini, “My art is my revenge.” The last part of the poem jumps in time and space into the songlines of a murderous Australian Aborigine, who brutally destroys a woman with his “killing stick”:

He smirks, and in silence repeats that all life exists
At the expense of other life.

What is made is ultimately destroyed.

Bidart’s Imagination and Power (a nod to my dad, Thomas R. Edwards Jr., whose book of that name was nominated by the poet C. Day Lewis, Daniel Day Lewis’s father, for the National Book Award) is almost cinematic in scope. The prose is delivered with the controlled suspense of a Coppola flick. Like the great Jacobean dramatists, Bidart is aware of the possibilities of violence. In Stanzas Ending with the Same Two Words, he provokes, “Kill whatever killed your father, your life/turning to me again said before your death.” Ah, the possibilities of the page: the pared-down poems are not so much printed as sculpted. Bidart’s “which” craft resembles sort-of creation itself. Just blow off a little star dust. With its classical and revolutionary forms and themes, seething imagery, and complex ideas, Star Dust places the Spanish-French-Californian “Basque” American Bidart as one of America’s most important poets.

But to me he’s still “Frank the Dart,” a made man of the made-up poetry world. His work seems as accessible to me as a bowl of Frosted Mini Wheats eaten by Grandpa Bob. As a primary source, though, he is unknowable: a friendly stranger who comes alive on the podium and pulls an alien alphabet out of thin air.

By John M. Edwards | Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Just Down City

Text by Annie DeWitt, images by Jerome Jakubiec

 

My mother never said, Don’t Usher The Good Times In.  She never took the pot from my hand and said, Don’t Beat On It With A Stick.  Don’t Make Noise.  She never threw up the window shade and said, Don’t Look Out.  Or, I Remember Chilly Scenes of Winter.

I remember sitting around the fire while my father sang a song about a railroad that stretched all the way from our living room to Kansas.

“What else,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.  “Never mind. Teach me to dance in the kitchen.”

*

“The bus dropped me off at the corner of 9th and 10th,” you said.

“I thought,” I said.  “You said that bus stopped in the Bowery.”

“I thought so too,” you said.

Or maybe you said, “That fair went on for a year.”

It kept going round.

The ride I meant.

“Right here,” you said before I left with my belongings.

“Yes,” I said patting the trunk.

You said, “I sure will miss it.”

You were speaking about the chair.

I thought, Maybe I should sit in that chair a little longer.  Maybe if I sit in it I will start speaking upwards.

“Sightlines,” I think they call it.

*

“You can borrow my name,” you said that afternoon in Reno.  “If you need it at the Motel.”  We were chasing down my Uncle again.

“Who’s following whom,” Uncle said when we caught him.  He pointed out the window at a neon yellow Thunderbird sailing down the highway.

“Birdwatcher,” you said.  “Sightlines, they call it.”

Maybe they call it night driving in the west.

Maybe they call it fishing for sticky.

*

I could say I did not keep dirty laundry.  I never took his shirts and folded them out so the pit stains were under my head.

“What’s this mean,” he used to say whenever he freed something from my body.

“Just a drop in the pan,” I’d say.

These sort of rarities.

I remember happy.  Just like that.  Old boating shoes.  Faded red sweater.

*

You said you would pack my knitwear and drive me there.

You wanted to do things that made you look humble.

On the highway you drove with your hands over your eyes when we hit those square patches of sun.

 

When we arrived we unpacked me.  There was an old woman sitting at the entrance to the clinic.  She asked what I wanted with her mess.

“It’s MISS,” I said.

Afterwards, we stood on the street corner just outside the riverbank.  I cannot say I didn’t wear that white sundress.  You kept your car running.

“I guess I leave you off here,” you said.

*

Across the river, that ewe was struggling, hefting her rear back and forth so that her tail looked like it was swatting at a horde of fruit flies in summer.  Her calf must have been half way down her chute.

“The problem,” I said, “Is finding a small enough dropper.  One big enough to stick in the corner of our mouths yet small enough that it doesn’t emit so much that our nostrils start to fill.”

*

We watched the backs of that ewe’s shoulders.  The way she held her small frame.

*

The old woman keeps the apartment across the hall from mine.   The night after our first meeting she entered my room.  She turned the knob with her palm – gripping the teeth of the thing hard against her.  All you could see was the tops of her nails tapping at the brass.

She said she was wearing the coat her Grandmother gave her.  “In here,” she said, throwing wide the lapels and drawing me close to her body.  There was a small silk label.  Dear China it said.

In the cleft of her stomach there was a small pit where she kept all her food.  It was fair and broad and when I looked out of it I saw the place where I used to be before I came out here.  That spot inMcLean’s field.

When I’m stood there in that spot I noticed a good clean breeze coming on.

“I never said,” the woman said.  “I wanted to gather my own stale air.”

 

 

By Sara Femenella | Posted in Art, Fiction, Poetry | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Benjamin Gantcher

On the Trail of the Book

At dawn stanchions
stand at attention
when the pearl

sky with smudges
stretches
The bridge is the zone

of dull shadows
nosing around
the washed out snapshot

where the word oblivion
affixes wings
to the paperboy

and the road
is a partisan
smuggling colored thread

inside the cinder
garden The flickering
maiden will unfold

a garment of smoke
and embroider the name
of the air

_____________________________________________________________________________

Benjamin Gantcher’s poems have appeared in many journals, including Slate, The Brooklyn Rail, and Tin House. His first book, If a Lettuce, was a finalist in the National Poetry Series contest, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Painting: Ryan Schneider, I’m All Around You Now, oil on canvas, 96″ x 144″, 2010.

By Thomas Yagoda | Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

A Valentine’s Day Soundtrack From ESP

 

 

Love is War for Miles

Aquarius Heaven…
Blu and Exile (letter)
(Quit it) Nat Adderley (Give me my month) Blake
(Mike and the Sensations) Nico Jaar
(Anything Goes/You used to think) Erica Pomerance
(The Idea of Ancestry) Etheridge Knight
Blue and Exile (Don’t be…)
(Tia) Arthur Nunes
Gonjasufi (Love of Reign)
(Black Christ of the Andes) Mary Lou Williams
(I only know (what I know now))Blake
(Black Swan) Nina Simone
(Hello to the Wind) Bobby Hutcherson
(Seasons) Blu/(Tom Waits (The World Keeps Turning)
Nicolas Jaar (Why didn’t you…)

By Sara Femenella | Posted in Art, Dance, Music, Poetry | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

État de Siege

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, and sound artist. Her debut collection of poems Negro League Baseball was published by Fence Books last year. Brian W. Rogers is an artist, writer, and musician whose work most recently appeared in the London group show “A Sunken Trembling Recalled Dimly.” Together they have teamed up to form État de Siege (ÉSP) a production house whose work encompasses text, music, the moving image, dance, design, architecture, and curatorial platforms. In this project, they have focused their attention on the 70′s cult horror film Ganja and Hess, about an archaelogist who gets stabbed in the heart and becomes a vampire. The video below includes poetry by Fred Moten, and is a preamble to their forthcoming re-imagined soundtrack for Ganja and Hess. Below that is an open letter to Bill Gunn, the director of the film, regarding certain propositions raised by his film, such as how one extreme of motion can lead to paralysis and what one must do to avoid this, such as enacting a bridge between classical myth and modal myth.

The West is an insane asylum, a conscious and premeditated receptacle of black magic… every disappearance is a record (between checking-out and checking-in)
{Ornette Coleman- To Whom Who Keeps a Record}

1. Are there some things you would like to say, but have not been able to, because no one asked you the right questions?
[Être - Nicolas Jaar]

2. What are the politics of being ready to die, and what do they have to do with the scandal of enjoyment?  Of any action as one way ticket to the end of health? ‘The love-recovery cycle that Barthes maps in his works is an ever refining self-fertilizing cycle wherein nothing must be wasted as it is needed in the next phase of the cycle,’ impregnating the place where memory flinches and (esp.) begins and at once slows down and accelerates the metabolism of that commons, into the decadent non-territory of the idea of an “other” as an ego-ideal whom the self  can achieve through devotion. In those moments of precise forgetting, did you find the traumas and excitements that express the need for a modal myth most acutely?
[Moodymann - I can't kick this feeling when it hits]

3. The statues in profile featured in the title sequence remind us of an experiment that Derrida proposes. Do you know it? ‘This is an experiment of acting as if you were dead. […] But what does it mean to be dead, when you are not totally dead?  It means that you perceive the object as it is or as it is supposed to be when you are not there. To see the vessel as such means to see the vessel as it would be without me. If I were dead it would remain the same as it is, the colour, the same consistency, and so on. So, to relate to an object, means to relate to it as if you were dead. That’s the condition of truth, the condition of perception, the condition of objectivity, at least in their most conventional sense’ (Will you give up your death for me?) And so, if life is endless, why not try to relate in this way, what is the risk. What is the cost that we are not willing to pay? On the other hand what is the pleasure of mortality or so-called loss that we refuse to admit in order to keep it sacred and free from principal, free from the colony of false nobility?
[Rufus Harley - Queens]

4. If ultimately oblivion is abundant, one has reason to ask, ‘on what grounds does one critique and propose an alternative to the brunt of exclusion and the sense of social shipwreck one suffers from?’ Is it a form of suffering or a relief? Does our exclusivity relieve us? Are we absolved by a feigned turning against them—toward what? (‘I will not be punished, I will not be tortured, I will not be guilty,’ Hess decrees)— And from this can it follow that philosophy is a prison, that it destroys the uncustomary things about us? That the frontier is a prison? That the route past nothingness is to accept nothing in particular? That the vehicle driving us toward abundance is extreme stillness just as the route to paralysis is frenzied motion?
[Julia Holter - Introduction]

5.  What tole does the yearning for ritual in a culture where trends often supress traditions, take/give in your film? Ideas of oblivion and tedium often unite in the sublime (transcendence of limits of the human condition) their inevitable destination, where they are turned into a solemn abundance that often shows up as ritual and the place where ritual and addiction meet and do not diverge (at once forgotten and remembered needs). Do you believe that ritual should engage variation deliberately in order to separate itself from addiction, bearing in mind that anything repetitive becomes a need no matter how sacred or pernicious? How do we improvise on a ritual and re-tell it to itself again and again ad infinitum, what role does the sacrifice play in that coiled and elastic dynamic, where does it enter its disappearance and reject it, live on? You can’t enter into this dynamic except in exhalted states, elevated states. How do we conjure those states while at the same time resisting their capture? What is the economy of survival in Ganja and Hess? How is an addict’s labor different from a worshiper’s?
[Monks of Bhutan - Silnyen played solo]

6. Is eternity an impervious horizon and do the acoustics of blood allow us to at once traverse and return to the forever that the blue myth of life eternal lures us across? Is the film a myth of/for black America, of/for America in general, the sole (soul/sold) myth retrieved as the ‘terror and terrible lure of vacuum?’ Voices from beyond the event horizon, trying to out-mode our oppressors, to translate our motion across that border? Creating an impossible space between origin and dream/out-dreamt origin, unoriginal dream, the lucid dream everyone wants to learn how to possess but is afraid to enter, a certain amount of traveling, deferred. Choreographer Alvin Ailey believes that movement is molecular revolution, ‘blood memory,’ future anterior, and that any black body in motion has experienced centuries of war and pain ‘no casual pleasure brought about those features.’ Hess says of Ganja, ‘Some great horde of peoples have had to suffer’ to bring about her beauty. In grappling with erotics of suffering (the does-my-distress-arouse-you rhetoric) what did you discover about our agency therein? What is peace in this context? What is justice?
[Julian Priester - Coincidence]

7. One of the things that we are trying to inquire toward is the role of aural hallucination in Ganja and Hess. The way in which sound abducts away from the optic towards a kind of blind transversality, plothole in the lightsickness of the past three hundred years. This is to say that it (the one way border the recording is a portal across) is one of the conditions for the choreography of syncope, of possession, of being possessed and dispossessed at the same time. 1976: Julian Jaynes puts forth the Bicameralist theory of mind. If his formulations are just, it can be said that we have inherited a memory of experiencing ourselves as ghosts. We are haunted by exteriority only inasmuch as we fear (because we know) that we are a focalized twist of that exteriority, to hear is to be unbound toward it, that we are laced by it, that the real trauma is that we experience ourselves only as ourselves, rather than being no one. It’s not that minds changed, it’s that we evicted the ghosts. Hallucinatory fugitivity and it’s rush toward eternity; endlessness; devotional erasure; ambivalent rapture; the audial smudge; a voice followed to the other side of the event horizon–
[Theo Parrish- Love is War for Miles]

By Sara Femenella | Posted in Art, Fiction, Film | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)