Wurster with Campanile

 




























Wurster... A school is a strange and beautiful thing—a kind of home, even if it’s too big to really be a family. With its great aspirations and many contradictions. Students, as if in a dream, sitting together at the bottom of the main stairs—maybe a dozen or so, talking with each other, or just being in each other’s company. The feeling of walking into the building (it’s always called, “the building,” with heightened attention), the chance encounters—as when I saw Jarkal one evening, at the tower elevator door on the second floor—I ‘d walked in that direction, not knowing quite why—and there he was… a friend. Back two years to when he’d be studying on the fourth floor, just outside my officer, sitting with his laptop display of extremely elaborate drawings—a world—and Reem would come up, smiling, excited—they were friends, too.

That kind of place—known and unknown. Or known just enough, snatches of people’s lives—their children’s lives, even (Paul’s daughter, Rivka, this fall, sitting at that same fourth floor table)—or looking down the long hallway on the first floor, late on a Tuesday night, catching sight of a small group in the distance—the real estate class, maybe—Callot, jacket and white shirt, distinct—and the animated figure of a girl alongside, her arms raised, expressive—Lucy, I knew…

Or Edward, last week, 10pm, as we were standing together in the south tower elevator—his thoughtful face, not young,  a pair of new work boots. “They’re waterproof,” he tells me… Or Tyler, in his own realm, coming in to work, unassuming, a touch jaunty, glad that I call him by name…

The courtyard on an early evening—walking in from the parking lot in back, lights on inside the second floor, and maybe a few in the tower. The expanse of brick, someone sitting on one of the wooden benches, or there inside, seen through the glass. Sky above gray concrete—it’s own color, the sunset to the west, beyond,  unseen, at dusk, the building interceding, it’s presence, rising up. Everyone’s life exposed for a moment—a figure at a window—or no one at all…

Photo and writing in this post are from November 18, 2017 

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How to navigate this blog:

The opening post will remain (at least for now) Wurster with Campanile. The subsequent posts are chronological, with most recent at top, earlier posts below. You can also locate individual posts by title in the side-bar menu. As you'll see, this is a work in progress...
 


So, read the first post, at the bottom--Tony's Office--then dip into the rest as you wish! They're in order of their creation, but the narrative is one of association...
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At best this is a sampling—so many people that I value have been left out—but remember that I started with the photos—the available photos—the ones I made in my office, and then from recent years of classes, particularly VS185X Songs & Places—and it’s these experiences that are reflected here. Each post started with a photo, the writing followed, so the process of inclusion was intuitive.

One thing that struck me throughout was how attached I am to so many of you—and how this can be seen in all the appurtenances. A good word, no? Vladimir Nabokov used it in his book on Nikolai Gogol—the effects in the manor houses on each of the estates in Dead Souls—where the meaning of each item—a book, a bast shoe, a small conical pile of ash tapped out from a pipe smoked long ago—becomes a point of entry into the lives of everyone involved.

In addition, relative to my office—the layers as they’ve built up over time mean that it’s not just the objects themselves, and the memories they evoke—but the alluvial process per se—the layers becoming valuable in their own duration…

Alluvial is a good word, too. Maybe a little grand, since what we’re taking about are simply the effects of a lifetime teaching—books, grade sheets, notes, project assignments, reports. But each of these touch on individual lives, and in that they are like a river…

I worked on this for something over a month—May and early June 2019. The entries are individual, but they’re not really blog posts. I don’t think of this as a blog at all. Maybe rather the compact chapters in what’s turned into a fairly elaborate book!

All the associations and connections that often don’t get stated in a class. Can’t be shared, unless everything’s to be a digression. But here, digression is essential—it’s the whole point—how we discover which connections are most important.

Is the project finished? An impossible question! For now let me share what I’ve done to date, and afterwards (afterwards!) we’ll see. Does one continue to open these doors onto the past—or turn to something new and unknown? I have feeling it will never be either/or…
Feel free to send me your comments—best by email to  chambersstreet[at]hotmail.com

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Man of the Mountain

Man of the Mountain. That's no title! But there's something of it in the way I'm standing--and I can see that it's on that same Songs & Places finale night in the Spring of 2012. Fiesta / Vecherinka / Hoedown. (See Song Night post.) Must be fairly early, because there's still some light coming in the window, through those full-height Wurster shutter doors. Yellow rose on the table, concertina. Incandescent spots, and a few of the extra moveable-panels for the students' work. The walls around the room would have been covered with drawings and paintings, but we've pushed the big central tables aside to accommodate chairs for guests--these events tended to be popular--sometimes students would remind me they'd attended one several semesters before. I always liked that continuity, of course--but the paths and byways were a mystery to me--especially since these Visual Studies classes were so far outside the Wurster mainstream. Which in many ways was their purpose. An autonomous world, like one of those small Mediterranean countries with obscure royal families and fine beaches--a place you'd go in August for a month's holiday, anticipating that special things might happen--ones you never quite got at home...

And yet they were serious, too, in their own way--that goes without saying--for I really did want the kids to be familiar with these strands of tradition that we'd inherited through the songs. Even if half the time they were very personal, made-up even... Everyone of course singing in their own way...
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The founding experience, for me--and I think it explains the island analogy above--was Catalina. We'd go there for a week each summer, first time with my grandmother in maybe 1954. The big steamer, heading out of San Pedro at dawn, across the outer harbor and through the breakwater, and then into the first of those rolling Channel Island ground swells. Which told us we were on the open sea...!


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Bethany

Bethany. We were always looking for an accord, that's one thing I remember. Bethany Snyder here--you can see immediately that she's a person who feels her way through the world, something I always appreciated (I think I made a place for those kids in particular) but at the same time, it made her vulnerable. She wrote me about this once--a lengthy email about how something I'd said in a critique had hurt her. What she wrote gave me a good sense of all her backs-and-forths--which weren't always the same as my own. But I was glad that she'd tried to articulate it. And in any case, she knew that I was on her side--which was true. It's like a stance relative to the world--you have to protect (make a place for) the things that are valuable.

We're upstairs in Room 491 again. With the worn plywood walls, before 2009. You can get a sense of the north light coming in from the bank of windows over the courtyard--a little harsh because there was so much glass. Our painting set-ups were pretty much ad-hoc--most of the students worked in water-based acrylic, so it was more experiment-as-you-go than any set of classical techniques. Which wouldn't have been my style in any case. Things could get chaotic, as if they were burrowing into their own worlds. At least that's how it feels here. And those worlds reflected their own states of mind...

I'd ask the students to put up their work, each new painting as they made it. Everyone had a stretch of wall space just behind their desk. Painting on cardboard, so there were no formal pretensions in the materials. Those walls could be quite revealing--something I think we all sensed. Something to be taken in more than  defined...


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Note: The photo is probably from my old Motorola flip-phone, always 72 dpi, so everything's a little blurry--which means just as it should be...


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Valdemar

 

Valdemar. A photo he sent me, at the outset of the first  México class (VS185X Songs & Places: México) early in 2013. I'd asked everyone to get a copy of Octavio Paz (El laberinto de la soledad), and also this volume by Frances Toor, Mexcan Folkways. Which no doubt must have seemed strange and maybe a little amusing to Valdemar, whose family came from such deep Mexican roots--which he shared with us in his presence, really--his perceptiveness, a certain reticence, his Valdemar smile--that no understanding could ever be complete, that meanings needed to be touched on, precisely suggested, allowing always for the idiocyncracies of those involved. Better, their indiviudality--just as with Valde himself, the twists and turns in his own life... A back and forth...

As with Benito and Emiliano here (Juárez and Zapata, of course)--that understated playfulness--which Valde shared with us, too...

 I came upon him reading late one afternoon--it was before the class, and he was on the first floor of Wurster, in a nondescript chair, leaning back against the plywood wall--at the far end of that antinomian review space--holding a volume of Erich Fromm, in Spanish. When I saw the book, I felt I'd seen a whole new side of Valde's persona--this mid-century European humanist social thinker--whom I associated with an afternoon's browsing in the philosophy section of the Reed College bookstore--the name seemed from a long time before, I associated Fromm with the endless 1960's discussions on the meaning of life, in a time when people were moving back to the land, establishing communes, looking for new ways to live together.

Together, that was the word--On Being Human--always the inclusive view, a concern for each other, Valde's own quest. With family, with all of us...Cats included...

He told me about a film once--a favorite, I could tell--El lado oscuro del corazón. It fits here, too--the way Subiela created that atmosphere of closeness--the lines from the Girondo poems, rhetorical, but always pointing to a shared meaning--filmed in the intimate world of an Uruguayan bordello--in the public room, where the characters gathered--came to know each other. A strange conceit, really--to find true love in this way--but that thought was behind Fromm, too. We live in a fallen world, Adam and Eve together, on a quilted bed, floating forever on the waters of a quiet river...

¿Cómo impedir que corre el  manso río...?

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Valdemar was there with us on the night of the last México class (see With Vreni post), and in looking for the photo above--I found this poem, which he sent to Vreni and me following. Let me post it as a way of reaching out to Valde at this time.. a mandarle siempre gracias...

Este soneto lo escribieron anoche ustedes, Tony y Vreni. Yo, fiel al destino, lo transcribo. 

Nos están borrando, dijo entre llantos

borran nuestro idioma, nuestros remedios

nuestras comidas y con sus asedios

borran nuestros sueños y sus encantos.

Nos están borrando, gritó entre cantos

e hizo así de sus lágrimas sus medios

y con su voz nos llevó hacia otros predios

donde la guitarra conjura espantos:

Ojalá que te vaya muy bonito

de las luces que dajaste encendidas

todavía alumbra aquel farolito

y de noche hay un pobre venadito

que a tus brazos se acerca a escondidas

para amarte en sueños poco a poquito.

Valdemar

With Vreni

With Vreni. Somebody in the México class must have sent this--wish I remembered who, I'm indebted! It's very much the way I'd like to remember all those evenings--and who knew that this may very well have been the last of them! (Mark Anderson very generously wants me to keep a cubby hole in his office, so maybe I'll still find ways to continue to connect with Wurster...)

Vreni, so like her, appearing out of no where. It was the song night at the end of the semester, Spring 2018. (VS185X: Songs & Places: México.) I'd invited her, of course--hoping that we'd get to sing together (see Vreni post)--always truly special, in part because I think we accepted each so totally. And with our own history of the songs (Fallaste Corazón, Paloma Negra, En el último trago), starting years back with her stories of her abuela in Guanajuato, and how she'd learned them herself--it was always a return in the fullest sense. Which we both understood...

Valdemar joined us, too (always a great pleasure to see Valde!) so there was one mutual friend, but the group otherwise was all new--and only Vreni had a sense of where we might take the evening together. (She's a wonderful musician, so this confidence comes naturally, but she needed to help me convince the new group--that holding back in the school mode just wouldn't cut it... We needed to sing!)

There was a certain amount of drink, yes, that was true of those evenings--but what's important was what Vreni had to tell them. She started in--I don't even knew if she knew where she was going--becoming more and more animated, until finally, she got to the very top, looking out across the room--all the faces just like hers, kids from the families from México, and she cried out to them-- !Nos están borrando!  (They are erasing us!) her passionate Vreni voice, urging--demanding--that we remember where we come from--and that we fight for that memory...

Fight, struggle, resist--persist--sing, contemplate, embrace--all those qualities of being, mixed together, towards some beautiful unknown--but together, yes,  as in the songs...

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Sarah Brady

Sarah Brady.  So many places to start, with Sarah--but she posted this duck on her Irish Soda Bread site--so why not? First, it's modest and appealing, but there's a touch of edge in the way she's turned its head--very much like Sarah herself. And you can see she loves these creatures, human and otherwise.

We met when she started my ED11A drawing class--that was Fall 2009, and as it turned out, the last time I did the course--so Sarah's presence was very fitting. She was a good drawer throughout, but the final project, Ancestral Realm, was the one that really engaged her. An Irish family on the slopes of Mount Shasta--that was Sarah's growing up. American, of course, but her Irish roots were close--the Soda Bread came from her mom (and her grandmother prior) both of whom figured in the wonderful set of drawings she made. The women's side--not exclusively, Sarah often spoke of her father, too--but it was the recipes and the cooking and the home-bound part of her past--a Shasta cabin in the rain, the muddy roads down to Redding for school--the Irish Soda bread--these were Sarah's anchor. Very far from my own realm, but we connected immediately--maybe because I immediately appreciated the strength of Sarah's own sense of connection. Which she later called "the sacred qualities of everyday life." That pretty much covers it for me--said so simply and so beautifully--so like Sarah.

After the semester she made the trip to Ireland. There were relatives and family places--her notebooks are filled with Sarah's wonderful drawings--but again, what you feel most is the connection. The necessity of being there. Which also means the necessity of just being.

I have many many Sarah stories, maybe because we did share so many things. (They're part of my treasure!) Like the Thursday evenings after class, when I'd give her a lift back to Lothlorien. We'd drive down Piedmont at 10:30pm,  past all the re-founded fraternities and sororities--their participants out on the street in party clothes, some with drinks in hand, moving in pairs and trios and clusters towards the un-designated tour buses parked on the circle at Channing--to be whisked off somewhere into the night. I saw Sarah watching, through the window of my ancient VW bus--we both felt that this was foreign territory. "Fort Apache," I said to her, "that's where we're heading. Get you through all this, M'am..."

Sarah smiled--she knew what I meant--but I think she also saw the people just outside...


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Mississippi John Hurt

Mississippi John Hurt. He was always just the best. Maybe not in terms of technique, or even the songs (he often did old ones, probably well known in his day)--nor even his impeccable orchestrations (simple, water-clear, beautiful)--but somehow in the humanness of his touch. Never used a thumb pick, for example--so that the feel of his right thumb on one of the base strings became a part of the music itself. The same quality you find in the falsetas of Andulusian gypsy guitar player, Diego del Gastor. Who always played to accompany the singer--that was the tradition, the guitar supporting the voice--and the voice carrying the culture itself. Not quite the analogy with John Hurt, for both his playing and his singing were crucial in just the way they supported each other. A kind of joy. People would smile when John began one of his songs. Or (as Betsy urged) a kind of faith?

Isabel here drew his face on a piece of plywood. I think it was a very good intuition on her part--a way to get at Mississippi John Hurt's connection with the world. Through the music, of course--but you see it in his face as well.

Isabel told us once that the first song she could remember (that being our first S&P project) was one she'd heard with her mother, at a civil rights demonstration in Los Angeles. She was quite young, but the song registered--and through it the event, and the feeling of her mother's commitment. Maybe some of this went into the drawing as well?
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I also remember that in applying for the course, Isabel wrote me months ahead, from Spain, where she was studying abroad for the year. So maybe my Diego connection wasn't so far fetched...?
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Izzy Halpern--she's now in San Diego, an artist and teacher--and I see online that she often works directly with people in the community. So these connections continue...

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The Napoleonic Model

The Napoleonic Model. Have no idea who took this, but there's Mario Ochoa--I' think he sent it to me. I like his face--that combination of skepticism and non-chalance. Always have. We're in the old Room 491--my Visual studies studio, before shifting downstairs. So the year is before 2009. How did they talk me into the pose? No trouble really--I always liked an element of theater. And apparently my Napoleon proved just right for the occasion.

Mario graduated in Architecture, and went on to grad school at Syracuse. (I remember writing for him. Always something of a challenge when the person in question is in the midst of figuring things out. But maybe the Napoleon here gave him some extra confidence? That you could do anything?

Remembering Mario's telling me about the mine his grandfather had dug in the mountains of Baja. A good story at the time, but even better when you know that Mario did indeed pull it together--and became an architect. I just looked at his face on LinkedIn--his smile. Maybe that skepticism proved a form of hope...

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Song Night

Song Night. One of our end-of-the-semester events, always a good conclusion to the class, and also a chance to get all my musician friends together. There's David Beecher, with violin (David teaches history at Cal) and Mauricio, on guitar, smiling--and Kory, to my left, whose face says she's enjoying herself. (I remember that Kory had joined us impomptu--but she knew all the México songs, with her compelling voice. See Kory post). David plays beautifully--and just about anything, by ear--it was always a treat when he'd sit in. Fine accordion by Max Chanowitz, from behind.

We're in the old Room 170--dark wood walls to the right, lots of contemplative  middle distance to get lost in. (This quality vanished when the room was re-done all white two years later.)

Oh yes, the identifier tag. There in the screenshot, unfortunately--but I guess I'll always know that that's me...
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I liked to give names to those evenings, this one being Fiesta, Vecherinka, Hoedown. Spanish, Russian, and American. Sometimes with a special songbook to match--for that night, see http://anthonydubovsky33.blogspot.com/
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The yellow rose on the table. From the garden on Miramar, one of Betsy's. I must have brought it with her in mind, too...


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Tan Songbook

Tan Songbook. An alternative title for this post would be Concertina Man. I put these songs together over several years, then realized in about 2007 that I had a set--the basic song list for VS185X Songs & Places: American Roots. A good number of them come from the published collection, Rise Up Singing, but that volume was much too elaborate (including some Beatles, Broadway show tunes, etc.) and I wanted the focus here to be (my own vision of?) American folk music. Beginning with Down in the Valley and You Are My Sunshine--two poles in the American consciousness, and both involving a combination of love and loss. (Maybe all love songs work this way?) The clumps of songs move through the American landscape, following the frontispiece map from one of the early Lomax collections (songs by region) but also allowing for authorship and personality (Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt) and theme (Cowboy Songs, Railroad Songs, Sea Shanties). Plus Spirituals and Blues. About 30 titles overall, corresponding to the CD that we put together (with Anthony Bello, who helped me in organizing that first S&P class). All can be found online at http://anthonydubovsky33.blogspot.com/

Right alongside (partly visible) is our Gray Songbook, which included more recent tunes along the same lines--for example, Rivers of Babylon, and Bob Dylan's He Was A Friend of Mine and Kingsport Town--still two of my favorites. Sometimes starting a new class with the Dylan would somehow provide a bridge back into the older songs, less familiar to kids today. Which makes sense, because that's what Dylan himself had done in writing them. Or maybe they're just great songs!

Again, an alternative title for this post would be Concertina Man--because of the drawing. It came from one of my Analects--clipped out and collaged onto the cover. (The Tan and the Gray Songbooks have different versions of this drawing.) It was always one of my favorites--maybe because it seemed the most true. In part because of the bare feet and flip-flops (an Oceanside childhood) but also that raised toe--which took me to Guilin in 2003, the boat journey down the Li Jiang, and all the old Chinese poems. In some sense, every time I made one of these concertina drawings I also became part of that line of Taoist wanderers...

I always wondered whether anybody got this--or if it simply seemed an act of ego to put my own picture on the cover?
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My brother Peter's songwriter friend, Jack Tempchin, told me a story once, about why he'd play his raunchiest R&B songs on a cheap Stella guitar, the one with the with the dodgy sound-hole pickup. He said that was the only way they sounded right. Jack, by that point, could afford any guitar he wanted, but nevertheless, he'd take the Stella and  perform occasionally on corners in downtown San Diego--just this older guy with guitar, playing on the street for change...

After Peter died, in 1999, I took my concertina to the Calypso, where he'd always enjoyed playing. (A truly delightful restaurant-bar on the coast in North San Diego County, run by French father and son, Henri and Gilles.) Jack was playing there, together with Peter's old group. I remember that first night--when at one point they did Corinna, Corinna, which I knew, of course, but it was unclear if the key would work, so I ducked outside to try a few notes--and sure enough, they were playing it in C...

Played with them many times after, always to the side--just my single lines of notes, on the concertina... Something of Peter's spirit, perhaps...


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With Kory and Max

With Kory and Max. This would have been VS185X Songs & Places: The International Edition, in Spring 2012. (I named it for the English language version of the Herald Tribune in Paris..) We were blessed with some particularly good people that term--including Max here, with accordion. An architecture major, with an architect's acuteness, Max brought a very individual sensibility--the way he'd structure his projects in terms of oppositions--I remember his Mississippi John Hurt Avalon, with the city train and country train pulling beautifully in opposite directions. But he also brought a very generous musical sensibility--the subtle way he could add his Max phrasing to Goodnight, Irene. (See Songs & Places post.) Next to him is Kory--this may have been the first term we encountered each other,  but it seems now that we've been friends for ever. There were some Argentine songs that semester--but Kory's family was from México, which gave her a different perspective--I had to try and win her over to the canciones criollas. (Her father and uncle had been singers in some rough borderland cantinas as young men, and their rancheras were Kory's bedrock.) Months later, though, well after the class, she made her own trip to Argentina, in part to sort this out. (See Kory post.)

One of the things I loved about these Thursday evenings was the back and forth like this. (Probably the three of us during the class break.) Everyone brought their own experiences, but that table and lamp in Room 170 provided a common ground where we could begin to share them...
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The sign in the background was a project from Charlie Dubbs--who'd spent a year in the south of Chile. His engagement with the environmental plight of the local people in their struggle with a Spanish hydro-electric dam corporation was another of the strands in the class...


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Desk Drawer

Desk. Another of those assortment views--as with Daniel Spoerri, (see Tony’s Office) but in fact, the very opposite. For every bit of inadvertency here is potentially loaded, starting with the Evening Train catalogue--one of the last shows at Krevsky’s, from 2001, paintings I’d made from the Sacramento Delta, together with a number of the musicians I always loved and admired--Marian Anderson, Hank Williams, Howlin’ Wolf, their images in a kind of metonymy with the land itself. And which Delta, really--for it became clear that even here in California we had one of our own…

The show was scheduled for October--which turned out to be just weeks after 9/11--and the feeling of that time infused the way people saw the paintings. Not my intention, of course--but their autumnal/elegaic quality proved to be important--a reflectiveness that seemed to bring people together. At least many told me so...

I don’t know if an open desk can do this. Again, not my intention. And everything’s a jumble--but there’s Betsy’s book on Mississippi John Hurt (Max Och’s stories, which she transcribed so beautifully after he told them to us one evening in 2007). I’d bring it in for Songs & Places--had the students read her words, as a way (also) of being closer to the source...

Then the drawer itself--the desk has been around for quite some time--decades, no doubt--so that there’s rust on some of the edges. My favorite pair of scissors, too. And an old-style slide-lecture laser pointer--you can see the button there in the open scissor handle. They were never entirely dependable--whether the battery connection was right--although I can remember the counter at Staples in El Cerrito where you could find them for purchase, just below, in the glass case.

Oddly, it’s the color here that’s most important. Or the combination (juxtaposition) of colors. Leave folders in office, on the dense pink post-it. Goes well with my Daubigny trees. And the two tiny red shoes in the array of squares on the gallery card above--or the parallel red eraser cover on the end of the blue mechanical pencil.

Pointing to these things now moves the eye around--my own included--one of the perks of a photograph--but it still makes you wonder, “Did I see this then…?”

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Window

Window. From February 5, 2018. It’s quite amazing how our digital world keeps these things straight. And then, of course, we project back and try to imagine that day.

The photograph was from before I’d realized just how poignant these scenes might be--something that happened later, as we got closer to the move, and as inside-outside became a metaphor at even more levels. Here there’s a mystery, but it’s pretty straightforward. The view outside to that tiny figure seated below. You get these views when you’re four floors up, but often the window is closed (layer of glass intervening) or you’re simply not paying attention. But with the frame canted open as it is here, outside becomes inside--the great ideal of Wurstser’s houses, actually--and a vision of California possibility.

You feel that here as well--one of those mild afternoons in what should be winter--sunlight on the trees and grass…

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The choice of factory windows was probably not intended for this purpose--the in-the-middle-of-space effect--but it would always be a delight to glance up for a moment and see the world with this kind of clarity.

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In Mail, Out Mail

In Mail, Out Mail. In the great tradition of cardboard furniture--well, let's say that it's in my tradition of cardboard furniture. A contradiction in terms, which I fully realize--and yet, the inoffensiveness of the material has so much going for it! Including here the addition of brown paper tape as the unifying element--a kind of cladding or skin that pulls the whole thing together. The holes I'm particularly fond of--made with a drop-forged steel punch--which has some use in the craft industry, no doubt--leather-work, book-binding or even light metal. But here it's important because of the way it allows for the rounded corners on the upper edge.

Not sure where that started, those rounded corners. Maybe there's a distant source in Neo-Spanish Colonial San Diego, or later, in Oceanside, with the arches of Irving Gill. Shapes that register as part of one's childhood. Or maybe from my father--I have a large pine cutting-board in the studio which he must have made in the garage at some point. The corners are rounded, just like this, but probably with a hand jig-saw and then a wood file, so that they're less precise. (That’s a good quality!) Just like his wooden bench, from the San Diego years, before we moved to Oceanside in 1954. Constructed of 1x12 clear redwood (that's all that was available in those days--apparently it was cheaper to distribute the wood milled in wide boards--some as much as 30 inches--rather than go to the expense of cutting it down), with hand-chiseled rabbets for the diagonal braces.

Dad always used hand tools. I have two of his saws on a rack in the studio--rip and crosscut, with the old varnished-hardwood handles--one with a medallion of some sort, a mark of the tool maker. They hang side by side; I made a place for them when I moved from Oakland in 1995.

As a reminder, of his presence, the way he made things, enjoyed the feel of the wood. He took up sculpture after leaving the business--working in oak and douglas fir--tall 12 x 12 blocks which he'd shape first with a hatchet, then with chisels. A set of chisels. The work always had that feel of Russia--even though I wasn't sure at the outset what this meant. (He'd been born in the Minsk Province in 1904, so the wood and the ways of working it were in him--part of his memory of the physical world all around. My grandfather, who worked in the printshop and a sa a felsher in the plywood factory before. (The same feeling as in Russian folk toys, even their entirely commercial descendents one sees at the laquer box/ /matryoshka booth at the Del Mar Fair....)

All I knew of that life were the things he made, so I'm now realizing that what I learned from was already a memory. Probably crucial, although I don't recall his ever talking about it.

Maybe the cardboard, on my part, was an acknowledgement of the transcience.

My father never regretted coming to this country--he greatly enjoyed their life in San Diego, the family and friends. His English was virtually perfect (I was probably the only one who caught that rare missed vowel.) But when he made things with his hands, something of that old Russian life was in him, too...

And it was from those things that I learned the most…

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Existential Kazoo

Existential Kazoo. One of those crazy words--or at least a word whose origins are mysterious. And with a very American strangeness, too--the way something coming from no doubt so far away has been adapted totally into the local. Local in terms of skill, too. That is, you can be a very modest musician--no musician at all, really--and find yourself playing one. Although it does take a certain gumption...

Spirit might be better, although I like that Scottish root. A tube of metal, originally--maybe clay?--like a tin-whistle, with one raised flange which holds a thin sheet of parchment paper. Blowing into the tube causes the parchment to vibrate, and the voiced sound--that kazoo effect--comes from humming along as you blow. Like singing, but without a care in the world as to the quality of the notes. In other words, very American...!

I'd always be on the lookout for willing Kazoo players--who in a new Songs & Places class had that combination of extrovert along with a delight in total immersion? Plus a high tolerance for very likely real-time embarrassment? My search process was trial and error, always. Starting with the purchase of a big box of the instruments (too grand a word, no?)--from Hoener, in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, originally--although the kazoos I get feel as if they are the ultimate product of Chicago.

A little bit like party favors, at the table, when we're all seated together. I'd open the box and hand them out. No down payment! Everybody gets one. Then that first tentative moment when one of the kids tries his (hers) out. That already slightly compromised glance as the tube is inserted into the mouth--and then, an even more tentative toot. Although toot isn't the right word to capture a kazoo's squeaky blather.

Then what you need next is the right song--not something tender and lyrical, like Elizabeth Cotten's Freight Train... but rather a truly raucous version of  Rock Island Line...

Jesus died to save our sins,
Glory be to God, gonna need him again...

Yes, the kazoo may well be the world's premier anti-clerical instrument--it just begs for the obstreperous. But, at the same time, its good-heartedness--and the fact that everyone just has to smile--and smile broadly--when they're played--makes the experience both friendly and likeable!
Very American qualities as well...

Low bridge, everybody down, low bridge, well we're comin' to a town,
And you'll always know your neighbor, you'll always know your pal
If you've ever navigated  on the Erie Canal...

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The photo above provides your existential kazoo experience--the box, that is--I'd set it by the door with the intention of adding it to the give-aways, but then realized I liked the chiaroscuro effect...

Also, it seems that the word kazoo is onomatapoeia for the sound... Although there's legend of an African-American musician from Macon, Georgia--Alabama Vest--who's said to have invented one around 1840. Which makes sense, given the long history of vibrating-skin instruments in Africa...

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Argentine Remnants

Remnants from Argentina. Not the most engaging of photos--too blocky and obvious, the elements don’t quite turn into anything beyond themselves--but it does convey the experience of returning to this particular corner, towards the end of the bookshelves, right behind the office door. The books are from a class I did just one time, in 2009--on Argentina--VS185X Songs & Places: Canciones Criollas. I chose Canciones Criollas to emphasize the music of the Argentine countryside--en el campo--rather than the tango world of Buenos Aires (the first thing everyone thinks of, naturally.)

The course involved some crucial reading--Lucio Mansilla’s Una excursión a los indios ranqueles--here in a translation. To my mind it’s one of the great books of the 19th Century, nearly lost, however, because it’s from a world that’s almost entirely marginal to European/American experience. Written by an Argentine colonel who’d led a group of men into the interior--tierra adentro--country then controlled by los indios Ranqueles (and other indigenous tribes)--with the hope of making a peace treaty to insure their continued existence. (Argentina was on the brink of intense western expansion, and the same fate awaited their native peoples as in this country.)

The book is a diary of sorts--a record of the expedition--and as a “contact” story it’s in a class by itself. Mansilla, in addition to his military flair, was also a very good writer--and his sympathies (sometimes quite ironic) with the Ranqueles shine through.

The cause was lost in the end--these peoples were wiped out--but the book survives. And for me, it provides a remarkably astute vision of the European Argentine sensibility in an encounter with lives and customs of a people who were very different--and in essence American.

My vision for the class was that some of these same encounters could be found in the songs. Not in the literal sense--but rather in how the songs convey the feeling of what it’s like to live in that remote country--what W.H. Hudson (whom we also read) describes as The Purple Land. Also a beautiful attempt by a European (a writer with European framework and tools, let’s say) to convey an American experience.

Which takes us back to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis--that synoptic attempt at conveying these beautifully distinct weltanschauungen… beautifully distinct visions of the world...

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The tall books to the left are also a memoir--De este lado del camino, by another curious figure--Polo Giménez, whose Paisajes de Catamarca remains one of the emblematic songs in the folclore of Argentina. The memoir was obscure, and impossible to find, so I had these copies made...bound in gray at CopyCentral, with one of my drawings on the cover...
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Both sets of books are here like this because they were extra copies--ones I ended up with after the semester’s end. It would happen all the time--I’d gather these hard-to-find sources, and some of the copies would end up on my shelves--either purchased or returned from the library. And I never had a plan for what to do with them, so they’d continue on as a kind of archaeological record of the class. Not a complete record, mind you--just the extra copies! And that incompleteness was part of what I’d see whenever I look at them there on the shelf. Still do...
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And now Robin tells me that libraries themselves are moving away from books--to be replaced by digital copies--so that even the physical experience here--fragmentary as it is--will be lost.

My own version of los indios Ranqueles, perhaps… Can I be my own Lucio Mansilla?

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A Box from Anne

  A Box from Anne. There’s no expecting--and we never know quite what will happen. Our friend, Anne Rice, must have sent these, years ago--Christmas cookies in a handsome metal tin. We enjoyed them, no doubt, but it was the box, later, that seemed to have the real value. I can see that I pulled away at the label, to get it down to the red enamel, but something interrupted--or maybe I didn’t have the patience that day--and parts of the wrapper stayed attached. So that it became a half-way box from Anne…

 It got moved to my office at some point--don’t remember that either--although I always liked to save important papers in boxes like this. The fact that the box came from Anne put an extra spin on the idea--so that they were now the important papers in the box from Anne…

 One of the first things I gave away, actually--as if to recognize the challenge. Dorry was walking by outside the office--a Planning grad who’d done some adventurous photographs in the VS20 class, so we had a connection. She saw me, and stopped to say hello. I told her part of the story (curious about whether Anne Rice would have a place in a young person’s consciousness) and Dorry was immediately enthusiastic. “You know Anne Rice?!!!”

 And why should that be a surprise? But I appreciated Dorry’s excitement--and immediately (well, alright, after a bit of internal hesitation) asked her if she’d like the Anne Rice box. It all seemed very simple--and of course Dorry said yes… So now I get to reflect on this again. Yes, it’s fine the box is gone--especially if it carries with it a smattering of the story (how on earth could I have filled in all the other parts that made a lifelong friendship meaningful? Although I did tell Dorry about the pre-vampire Anne attaching all the hundreds of stock-car photos to the walls of her Bonita Street bedroom…)

 And I think something else that prompted me here was a story Dorry had told me. About the vintage radio I’d put out for give-away the week before (see Radio Story post)--and Dorry knew that another of the Planning grads (she mentioned his name) had liked it, and it was now on his desk in studio. 

The stories had been displaced, of course--Dorry’s studio-mate didn’t know anything about Jesse Taylor and that intense project week back in the 1980s when Jesse and I had listened to the early Tom Waits tapes together--on this same radio--or even why there’d been a Cuco Sanchez tape in there last week when I’d finally decided to part with it…

Not even sure if decided is the right word…

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 Of course every object in the world must carry these kinds of stories--the root of the word haunted, no doubt.

Thinking of what the Czeslaw Milosz once said, about the Sierra Nevada mountains--how they frightened him, just because there were so many places without names.

Where in his own Lithuania, every twist in a stream, every patch of meadow had its own spirit, hidden just behind...


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Fallow Land

Fallow Land. It’s the run of these I like.  Almost a form of wealth--not measured in bank accounts and bills,  but more the sense of touch. That plus the fact that everything has been accorded its place--which, over time, can make things very hard to move.

My dear acupuncturist friend, Jay Sordean, sensed this in me (he was expert at all kinds of sometimes crazy advice): Why don’t just take everything and turn it upside down, throw it into the air--and then see how you feel?

A terrorist, no question. Even if a well-intentioned one. For he’d told me to follow an

idea, whereas what we have here is open land--the fields after harvest, just as I saw them in Guilin, in 2003--where each rice plant had been carefully tied to mark it’s place for the next season. Actually, I’m not sure if that was the reason--but the rice plants had been attended to individually--so that the effect was the same as a myriad of living cells. And cells doesn’t get it, either--more like the way that a corn-row hairdo can look so tenderly maintained. Each strand touched...

I used to imagine that the fields in the Sacramento Delta were like this--but on revisiting them later that same autumn (something we always greatly enjoyed), I could now see the marks of industry--the mechanical furrows. The colors beautiful, but no trace of the hand…

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Office Grill

Office Grill. No doubt some will object--this is an unquestionably groddy view. But it was late in the evening, and I’d been looking around--quite literally, that is--it was the night I took the last set of these photographs. And I’d moved beyond the things that were “personally meaningful” (these categories we make for ourselves!) to those that were meaningful in general.

 Not that I’m sure there’s really any difference. The grill here masks the innards of my office radiator. Came with the original building design in the early ‘60’s, and still very much reflects that technology. Like something from Sputnik, or an Explorer satellite--those hopefully rounded shapes at the end of each mechanical indentation. I’m sure there was a meaning attached--these things always have meaning. But now, time has taken control, and it’s very hard to see the form through the all the layers of corrosion--the dust and dirt, scuff marks at the bottom, the traces of rust near the floor. Each now part of the original--Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura again--the properties of an original at a certain distance...

 I wonder if that sounds as good in German--I imagine that the abstract nouns would seem even more abstract--whereas in English, it’s borderline Keats.

 Meaning that it's a part of each one of us…

Note

Note. I’ll put up a note--a blue Post-It in this case. Can’t remember the circumstances-something urgent at the time, no doubt. Isn’t that the Buddhist ideal, “urgent at the time…”? Every moment precious--although I’m not sure that this is what the masters had in mind...

The writing itself was precious, though--you can see that in the script. My own brio, with some of the letters still showing a trace of Lloyd Reynolds' calligraphy classes at Reed--the almost-Italic “a” in the second line--how he demanded we work to perfect that shape--the counter, as he explained. The shape inside.

Frank Bidart: The wall inside the wall...

And then, only a few years later, freedom became the act of abandoning those very forms--returning to a less-trammeled world. Here I think of Ynot, my junior high school namesake (Tony written backwards, pronounced Eee-not), still fun to say--and by doing so, to claim again that possibility...

Isaac Babel’s grandmother: You must know everything. Whereas in Oceanside, a good five-foot wave at the Pier would do just fine…

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The Materials

The Materials. George Oppen, the title of a book of poems. His second book, that is--published 28 years after the first--with all that had happened in between. The 1930's, World War II, the McCarthy period. Oppen had chosen not to write--or rather, he decided to face obligations that he'd determined went beyond writing. Labor organizing, for one, social justice--and a clarity as to political action. Which eventually by some miracle, returned him to poetry.

I first heard his voice on the radio--KPFA, maybe 1973--then met him by chance at a gathering in Berkeley--one of Stan and Anne Rice's parties. Oppen's tall, narrow frame, his crag-like features--a Jewish face, but from San Francisco--the simple directness--the clarity--of his words, like one of the sloops he loved to sail, by himself, leaning back over the rail, tacking into the wind. He and Mary made a remarkable couple--so different, yet so fitted for each other--a couple in an impossible sense--as if none of the other forces in the world could intervene.

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The case above also brings an interval. Dark hallway at the University of Warsaw--it's late summer, 1968, almost all the students gone, just one older woman with a wicker broom, sweeping the worn marble stairs.

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No, the case here comes from Berkeley--it’s part of the University, too. Picked out at Richmond salvage, I'm guessing--maybe discarded by the entomologists. It feels like it's contained things for a very long time. In its current life, a set of building materials--construction examples, Dana. I'd never looked at them very carefully before. Down the Fourth Floor hallway, in the alcove leading to my old classroom, Room 491. Another set of Wurster numbers--meaningful if you've lived them.

There's a new plate by the door, plexiglass, with sharply defined edges. The numbers are repeated below in braile. A thoughtful touch, until you realize they’re probably required by code. I believe the room is now used by Urban Design--looks rather formal that way. A regular classroom...

Braile numbers for the old Visual Studies studio... But the markings on the wall outside look very much the same…

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