Campaign '08: Back East

Nice to be back; I missed you.

Inside the Beltway, where I was for a few days, Hillary and McCain and, needless to say, Giuliani, are being slashed.
Meanwhile, in NYC, where I was for a few days, adulation was diluted by subtext
and by an artist with poor taste.

Hip Hop

This blog is on vacation and will resume 31 March.

Random

On Saturday, near the Farmers Market, just as McLuhan predicted, the old technology had been turned into trinkets. [click on images to enlarge]
Continuing along the Embarcadero, I took the only picture that could possibly make the Oldenburg bow & arrow look good.
At the Borders across from the ballpark, I was delighted to see that their new "face-out" policy was in place for litmags.
Back on Geary, the motorcycle cop who had just led the St. Patrick's Day parade picked up two pairs of new boots, which cost $600 each.
And, from a warm day earlier in the week:

Temporary Contemporary

I like to notice things, but I would like even more to be able to notice people. In action. Like Cartier-Bresson. Or Robert Capa.

So I was walking past the Swedenborgian Church on Lyon, when this guy on a high-wheeler rode by. I grabbed for my camera, but it was stuck in the same pants pocket as my bifocals. The guy rode off.

A while later, as I was waiting to cross Geary, he approached again.

What a lucky shot.

[click to enlarge] Please note the (extremely rare) emptiness of the intersection,

the manhole cover(s) and the red light and the don't-turn-left sign and the car wheel...which echo the bike's wheels,

the framing of the yellow crosswalks,

the street sign like a dialog balloon,

the lone pedestrian,

the cars vs. the bike,

and the floating shadow—just like C-B's puddle-jumper,

which is the reverse of Capa's Spanish soldier getting shot.

Normally, I'm just a landscaper, as with the temporary Contemporary Jewish Museum entrance:

Couldn't Put It Down

You've heard people say about a book "it was so stimulating I couldn't put it down." Click on image to enlarge; note title of yellow book lower right:

Holy Smoke

I got a seat at the back of the bus next to this dude who was reading a fat novel.

It had lots of dialog, I could make out that much. When he closed it up, I could see it was Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke.
I had been thinking of blogging on Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, but had held back because I like him so much and feel this latest effort was terribly misguided.

I asked the dude whether he ever read any literary magazines.

Some.

ZYZZYVA?

He was thinking of submitting something to it.

I asked if he'd ever published anything.

A story in Pearl, down in Los Angeles.

We introduced ourselves.

I said I'd send him the new issue if he'd send me a story.

He said he would.

We got off at the same stop and I asked to take his picture.

Spring has sprung

The Spring issue rolled out of The Watermark Press yesterday.

It may be our first perfect issue, at least in terms of production.

What a pleasure to work with a printer as fastidious and responsive.

The color on the cover actually looks the way it should, whereas, in the past, dealing with the jerks in Ann Arbor...it was always a surprise, even in terms of a solid background color, picked from a "chip" of all the possible Pantone colors.

The text is crisp.

The binding is clean and sharp.

How long must you wait for your copy?

If you subscribe: our good and faithful mailing house, Accurate Mailings, in Belmont, will take it to the Post Office tomorrow, and then who knows how long bulk mail takes? A week, or two, or, in the case of 94159, maybe three weeks.

If you wait to scan it at a bookstore: the distributors (Ingram and Source Interlink nationally, Small Changes out of Seattle, Armadillo in L.A., and Ubiquity in Brooklyn) are usually pretty quick; my guess would be a week or ten days.

Let me know when yours arrives.

The Corpse Riseth

I am attacked by enough zombies in daily life without having Andrei Codrescu revive Exquisite Corpse.

I loved the Corpse in the old days—the eighties—because it would publish the names of everybody who submitted. Now, of course, that's easily done—and more—online.

And I loved Andrei's great discovering-America film Road Scholar, the best film starring a litmag editor since Paper Lion. (The best play—and TV film—about a litmag editor is The Common Pursuit.) And of course I love Andrei's barely comprehensible accent on NPR.

But the new Corpse seems warmed over. Farmed out. Out of phase.

There are some things that should remain defunct.

Stairs R 4

I wish I had a stairbookcase.

Or one of these stairs exterior. [click on images to enlarge]

Tips on Drawing

The Tate, which organized the Gilbert & George show now at the de Young, is currently showing Neoclassical sculpture.

(I wish the de Young did more with its 19th-century sculpture.)

If you scroll to the bottom of the Tate's description of the show, you'll notice that materials are provided in the galleries so you can try your own hand at life drawing, that is, drawing from plaster casts, or, to be perfectly accurate, Neoclassical sculpture.

Nobody does this anymore, just as medical students no longer dissect cadavers. (Too time-consuming.)

So the unwashed public might as well.

I like the suggestion that you "try thinking about the the negative spaces instead of the body itself—what is the shape of the space between the legs...?"

Personally, I don't think it's necessary, at least in this country, to consider those spaces in a negative way.

Let's think positively while we are drawing The Bottom and The Giney and The Male Member.

Fifth Ave. Art Scene

There is something obscene about an auction house (Sotheby's) sponsoring an exhibition (Gilbert & George, who, in the early years, called themselves George & Gilbert—why did they change?) at a museum (the de Young).

Then again, there's something obscene about Gilbert & George, and I don't mean the stuff that prompts a "warning" at the entrance. I mean, the repetitiveness of their work for the last umpteen years.

I was in no mood for obscenity as I walked home along Fifth Ave.

Men's POV

In the delish Petaluma bakery della Fattoria, the unisex rest room is reached by going through the kitchen and up two flights of stairs that wind around a huge dumb waiter and along walls of wonderfully distressed green.

The shelf above the toilet is devoted to political work: a novel by McCain, Griffin's By Order of the President, The Silver Chalice...[click on image to enlarge]
On the other hand, above the men's room urinal at Nick's Cove in Marshall is an array of such famous conundrums as Ramses, Sheik, and Trojan. Personally, I prefer the subtler message in the rest room of the Point Reyes Station gas station. [click on image to enlarge]

Geography of Hope

I had lunch yesterday with former Board president Blair Fuller.

On the way, I stopped in Petaluma at Copperfield's [not an advertiser], which has recently expanded to include this huge array of magazines. Guess where the litmags are.
Yes, that's right: far left corner lowest shelf.

After lunch (BBQ oysters, crab cakes), I stopped at Point Reyes Books, which has organized a conference this weekend called Geography of Hope, at Toby's Feed Barn and other venues, to celebrate the work & legacy of Wallace Stegner.

Presenters include authors in the window David Rains Wallace (ZYZZYVA Spring '85, Winter '85, Fall '86, Winter '92, Fall '98), Barry Lopez (ZYZZYVA Summer '90), and Robert Hass (ZYZZYVA Fall '88, Spring '95). [click on image to enlarge]
In the next block, at Cheda's garage, the deer are busted.

The Watermark Press

Disgusted with our most recent experience with Thomson-Shore, a slovenly short-run printer in Michigan, we looked around town...and discovered The Watermark Press in Dog Patch (on the Bay side of Potrero Hill).

How wonderful they are. Here's our rep, Carole Shelton, doing a color check on the cover, with managing editor Kristin Kearns.
Our pressman, Julio, pumps up the cyan
and adjusts the Heidelberg Speedmaster,
which is one long mother.
Meanwhile, our b&w pages stand by.

The Classics Abused

The classics never go out of style, but they are often abused.

Spelling, for example, doesn't seem to count at Cinecittá. [Click on image to enlarge; understand that the Italian for eat is mangia; no, that is not George Lucas on the left, I don't think.]
Young love is discarded.

And the chair of choice for hip shrinks, an icon of mid-20th-century design, the Eames chair, though not in rosewood & real leather, is trashed.

Hardman & Howl

The artist and his wife, a.k.a. Chris Hardman and Annette Rose, a.ka. Antenna Theater, were taking tickets for his latest show, Sunday at the Presidio.
Mostly, sculptural with mirrors, but also 3-D
and shadows.
On the way home, I passed the sacred site on Fillmore below Union [note the plaque between the cars]
where Ginsberg read Howl wearing a coat and tie. [click on image to enlarge]

Grace for President

Yesterday, trekking down Fillmore, I passed 48-year-old Marcus Books—named after Marcus Garvey. I wondered what they'd have on BHO, but it was closed. [click on image to enlarge]
Grace for President, aimed at the 4-8 crowd (four to eight years old) was published by Hyperion last Tuesday.

Author Kelly Dipucchio has also written Mrs. Bloom, Clean Up Your Classroom and Bed Hogs. Forthcoming in May: Campfire Songs for Monsters.

Prize-winning llustrator LeUyen Pham lives in San Francisco.

P.S.

In a perfect world, Blogger would be more flexible and allow me to slug this lovely shot I took of Mrs. Dalloway's yesterday into the post which follows. [click on image to enlarge]

Slice of Berkeley

The line seems forever at Berkeley's Cheeseboard Pizza on Shattuck, just down from Black Oak [an advertiser].
But it moves quickly, because they serve only one kind of pizza each day.
Anyway, the Benny Shaw trio plays West Coast jazz in a corner
And the collective is high engergy.
The pie is delish, and then I had a Meyer lemon ice cream sandwich at Ici Ice Cream, just down College Av. from Mrs. Dalloway's [an advertiser]...and Pendragon [an advertiser]...and Diesel [an advertiser], where John handsold me The Savage Detectives and I upbraided him for not stocking BHO's Dreams from My Father.
Reader, I also had a toasted coconut ice cream sandwich, because I'm not in the neighborhood that often.

Mr. T.V.'s Campaign

I was schmoozing Thursday afternoon with Christin and Praveen, new owners of The Booksmith, at the Red Vic Peace Cafe, where Sami Sunchild shows her stuff. [click on image to enlarge]
Just outside, Mr. T.V., the world's first organic television, ran through his "campaign" routine after I gave him a buck [click on images to enlarge]:

he doesn't mean to be negative
he's in favor of change
and universe(al) health care.
On the way home, I saw a great budding tree.