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Archive for August, 2011

Wabi Sabi, Dwellings for Imaginary Civilizations, Nightverses

Posted in Architecture, architecture, art, Art Gallery, art,poetry,writing, Artuesdays, Berkeley Diaries, Books, Coffee, Collage, digital collage, photography, writing, architecture, Featured Artists, Poetry, school, School Work, sketching, Writing, writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 28, 2011| 2 Comments »

Various Graphite Media, depicting 'Dwelling for Imaginary Civilization of Little People,1998' by Charles Simonds. Made in clay, adobe, paint and housed in the New Mexico Museum of Art. August 2011.


Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

It is a beauty of things modest and humble.

It is a beauty of things unconventional.


From Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers


Photo via minecaching.tumblr.com. Click for source.



Charles Simonds began building clay villages, ruins and what he termed ” dwellings for imaginary civilizations of little people” in the 70’s, in New York.

His microscopic urban interventions at one point could be found, among others, in Paris, Venice, Shangai, Dublin.

They are now housed as prestigious artifacts in art collectors’ homes and museums (like the Whitney in NYC).

Photo via whitney.org. Click for source.

Photo via whitney.org. Click for source.


Click for more Charles Simonds’ dwellings

Watch the video: Dwellings 1972

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Simonds and Sarah



Salmon kisses,

I knead  essays at night

dream perfect poems–

lost silver strands become your hair.

I make collages of languid bathroom quotes,

images and cities.

Night drunk with words,

your eyes are full of them–

nestled in the cup of your arms

like Simonds’ tiny city in a new york warehouse.

A word thief,

of raspberry essence–

the poetry of portugal:

“Your toes are

little ducks

Sita to Shiva…”


You say I’m used to you like my mandatory doppio cappuccino,

Sarah’s velvet voice,

heaven in Corcovado nights.

You say my poems always have three words:

almonds, apricot, oil.

Here you go:

Downtown is on fire

Your almond eyes float like moons

Your skin is oil on water,

Apricot lips.


Berkeley, August 2011

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What a Difference a Year Makes {Escape Velocity}

Posted in art,poetry,writing, Berkeley Diaries, Film, Poetry, Writing, writing, tagged , , , on August 21, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Still from 'One Room in Rome'. 2011


Escape Velocity

I wake up in San Francisco.

I attained

Escape velocity

From you and your gravity

Your slate roofs

( to my terracotta tiles).

The bee drinks from the flowers in the fields

Liberally

There is only

So much happiness in one day.

I lost words

They slipped by and became dreams

And in dreaming, perfect sentences

(to poems that will never be, yet exist).

I asked my own

About a thousand years from now,

and if there’s a heaven for love stories

‘If there’s delight in love’, I said, ‘Tis when I see

that heart which others bleed for, bleed for me.’

Jilynnette said yesterday

her name like Ginger Ale

Gingerelle

our life is measured by streetlight time.

I told her about boulevards and run-on sentences

piazza, urban commas and periods.

I fell asleep reciting

Borges, Cortázar, the Center for the Art of Translation

as a rosary, not to forget.

You are gone at Harvest time

As the grains burst open

With sunshine.



Berkeley,  August 2011

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Confession of a Lurker | Entry for ONE LIFE International Photography Competition

Posted in Architecture, architecture, art, Art Show, Berkeley Diaries, Competitions and Collaborations, digital collage, photography, writing, architecture, Experiments, Le flâneur, Photography, photography, Portfolio of Work, Spontaneous Constructs, Thought in the Alley, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 19, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Entry for ONE LIFE | An International Photography Competition.

I decided to participate ( characteristically last-minute) to ONE LIFE, an international photography competition, in the ‘City Imagery’ category.

Click here (or on the image above) to see the entry at a higher resolution and, if you like what you see, vote and share my photograph.

The prize is $10,000 or a trip around the world. Guess what I would pick.

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Upon discovering ‘Meditations in an Emergency’

Posted in art, art,poetry,writing, Books, Collage, Cures for the Nothing, digital collage, photography, writing, architecture, Digital Manipulation, Experiments, Poetry, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , on August 18, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Embrace All Your Selves. Digital Collage. August 16,2011.

Embrace All Your Selves, Exhale. Digital Collage. August 16,2011.


 

The title of the book began as a very sophisticated literary joke, an allusion to John Donne’s “Meditations on Emergent Occasions.” But as sometimes happened in O’Hara’s poetry, the joke turned out to have a surplus of meaning. His poems are meditations — but not the kind that comes after hours of quiet thought; they proceed from the heart of noise; they are written on the run, in a hurry, on a lunch break, in a perennial emergency. O’Hara’s poems perfectly capture the pace of a New York day in 1962. He is a master of the art of gentle self-laceration: “Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern.”


Meditations in an Emergency

Frank O’Hara 1926–1966

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were
French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the
same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days
there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a
change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m
just like a pile of leaves.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor
with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need
never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t
even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record
store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is
more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as
it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh
huh.

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are
indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one
trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me
up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them
still. If only i had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at
home and do something. It’s not that I’m curious. On the contrary, I am bored
but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above
the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare
myself little sleep.

Now there is only one man I like to kiss when he is unshaven.
Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How best discourage her?)

St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like
midnight in Dostoevsky. How I am to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love,
but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from
it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be
distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes,
there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes
and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious
vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you,
beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like a final chapter no one reads because
the plot is over.

“Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that
little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit
a little too.—Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her.—I wish She
had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.”—Mrs. Thrale.

I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest
suntans. I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want
me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon,
there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the
lock and the knob turns.

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The Place That Cannot Be

Posted in Architecture, architecture, digital collage, photography, writing, architecture, Photography, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

View from Central Park, Manhattan. Lumix camera + Digital Alteration. Summer 2011.

 

The Greeks had two different interpretation  for the word “Utopia”.

The first one  (pronounced U-topos) meant “the good place”.

The second, pronounced Ü-topos, meant “the place that cannot be”.

 

Paraphrasing  Mad Men.

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Thinking of Amy

Posted in art, art,poetry,writing, Books, Cures for the Nothing, Drawing, Ink, sketchbook, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 10, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Thinking of Valerie. Ink on paper. August 10,2011.

From 'Art and Anarchy', Edgar Wind. 1965

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Waiting

Posted in art, art,poetry,writing, Cures for the Nothing, Drawing, Poetry, Writing, tagged , , , , , on August 3, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Marker on paper. August 3, 2011.


Il Nostro Canto

by Silvia Signorelli

il tuo passo a Milano

di cento stagioni

presso di me ha colorato l’aria

di silenziosa neve

d’inverno il calore

dell’estate abbracciata

di luce loquace

gazzelle

azzurre di mitezza

nostro canto

di bene grande

raggianti

Nuestro Canto

tu paso por Milan

de ciento estaciones

junto a mi ha llenado de color el aire

de silenciosa nieve

de invierno el calor

del verano abrazada

de luz locuaz

gacelas

azules de masadumbre

nuestro canto

de amor grande

radiantes

Our Song

your stride in Milano

of a hundred seasons

colored the air around me

with silent snow

warmth in winter

beheld by summer

by loquacious light

gazelles

blue with gentleness

our song

of a great love

radiant

From: La Tua Voce Sonora | Tu Voz Sonora

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