Maté

Maté. I do like the way each of these is different--these returnings. They tell a story, but one without words. A story we see, perhaps. So that the two maté gourds, side by side, become two brothers. Yes, that fits, even with just a single bombilla. That same perceived simplicity that tells you this is how things have always been.  

Not the romantic, of course--things always change--but the sources they change from are constant. As in color (the deep red-black of the Grifone bottle, its smokey orange label--and the way the patches of earth outside meander through the leaves. Mostly eucalyptus, close at hand, but there’s a redwood, too, growing up from the circle below. That’s where the Lindheim family placed the bench for Roz--it’s also wood, and at one point there was a plaque, with her name inscribed. But these things have their way of not lasting...

She was one of my first teachers here--probably the one who convinced me that I was in the wrong place. That beautiful round cast-resin cafe roof I was so attached to--had very little to do with architecture. But when I came back, several years later, as a teacher, we became close. And I came to appreciate Roz for the broad and generous way she saw things. (The time she invited Ivan Illich to give his lectures at Berkeley--he flew in from Mexico City, and made us rethink everything. Roz liked that kind of challenge. It seemed real to her.)

She applied it in her own way, of course--the work she did with the design of health clinics--that the rooms for the patients should reflect each person’s humanity. A tall order, in the mass-production world of contemporary design. A counter-top with an individual coffee maker--something like the maté gourds above--simple, so that each person would feel at home.

_____

I saw a young guy sitting on Roz’s bench once--an African-American student, with his laptop open. I approached him, and told him some of this story--why the bench was there, the things Roz valued, why she’d have been glad he’d found a quiet place to sit, the redwoods just behind.

_____

Maybe it’s the rose, which still has something of its own color. The way it twists up from the jar, finds its own place, too, amidst the branches…

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Guitarra

Guitarra. The guitar is crucial, of course. And at the beginning it was all I had on the wall. Even now, I’ve kept it simple. Maybe anticipating these changes? In the old office, before the 1999 retrofit, when all of us in the South Tower had to decamp for half a year, the walls were overflowing. You could almost not see the wood. My model (I still think of it) was a capilla in the Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City. The pilgrimage church for all of México. People would bring votive offerings to the priests, who would affix them to the walls of the chapels. The one I remember in particular had years and years of such remnants--bits of paper, bone, personal items (a comb, a pair of glasses, a part of a crutch) and of course photographs, paintings, drawings. Probably retablos, too, although at the time of my visit (in the summer of 1965) I was barely done with my first year at Reed, so I doubt that I’d have known how to recognize one. But I do remember the effect of seeing that wall--and in some sense I’ve searched for it ever sense. The density, for one thing (its layers were inches thick) but more than that, the sense of time. That each element had found its place, one by one, in response to the events themselves. There was no way to pretend here--a boat on the Gulf of Mexico in a storm, almost lost, the sailors made a prayer to the Virgen--if they were saved, they’d carry the main mast all the way to her church. Which they did, of course--it’s there in the broad courtyard just outside. Hundreds of kilometers from the sea…

The guitar itself has something of this, I’m thinking now. Not through externals--all the imagined stories and references of history--but in its shape. Its lines. Each new maker internalizing them, taking them in as his own kind of map of tradition. Doesn't even have to be a fine instrument--the one here is a Yamaha, from Japan, made in the 1990s. At some point the neck was broken--I think Mauricio took it into to Fat Dawg for me (Fat Dawg, long time proprietor of Subway Guitars, on Cedar Street, in Berkeley) who reset it (yes, you can see the expoxy) but he knew what he was doing, and the fingering is fine. It’s held that spot on the wall ever since. Including (there at the top) a piece of red cord--actually the sweatshirt tie from Aaron Newman--the young son of a dear friend. Left in my old VW bus, no doubt--maybe I used it to wrap or pad something, the sweatshirt itself being much too small--and then at some point I decided to let it go--but since it was so connected with Daniel--and with Sandra (Betsy’s dearest friend) I had to hold on to at least a part of it--and so the cord has been attached there ever since… That’s what the guitar hangs from…

Which means I think of them all (all now gone) each time I play it…

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New Year

New Year. Well, the second night of Rosh Hashanah, that is. We're in Room 170, on a Thursday evening, for the Songs & Places class (VS185X: Songs & Places: American Roots.) It’s actually the re-worked Room 170--the white cube--which goes to show that an adjustment in the lighting (relative to architecture) is the painter’s equivalent of planting trees. Brings the entire space together, starting with the hanging lamp over the middle of the table (now a potched-together set of smaller tables) which illuminates the corner here. Edges disappearing. Evocative. And the downlights on the walls do something of the same--overheads all off--so that the people present (the students, the group--all of us) can occupy a kind of open-ended space in between. Which is important. I wanted to say liminal, but that’s a word that reaches for too much mystery. So let’s just say space in-between…

We’re gathered round because it was a special moment (and the one in which Lauren chose to take the photo). I’m holding up a slice of apple. The honey container is there alongside, on the table, next to a paper plate with more slices. You dip the apple into the honey, and make a blessing for a sweet new year.

I always like returning to this moment--especially after the cycle of doubts about whether this year I’ll do something more traditional for the holiday. (Something more Jewish? But on the other hand, there couldn’t be anything more Jewish than the apple-dipped-in-honey--all intermediaries gone, just the fruit itself, unadorned, and  the pure material of the honey...) And as far as tradition, I always realize (at least over these past several years) that in fact this is a tradition. Our own--one we return to, at this time, and in this place…

Which everyone present seems to recognize…

_____

(Thank you to Lauren Melenudo for sending me the print. It’s from the Fall 2017 class.)

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A VS280 Evening

A VS280 Evening. A somewhat atypical photo--or at least this isn’t precisely how I remember the class. It captures a moment of insistence on my part--the Bolshevik programme side, no doubt--where my wish to complete a thought--an idea--was stronger than the more important challenge of moving with grace from moment to moment.

I’d been upstairs, in the office, in those minutes before class. Sometime soon after 5 o’clock, which is when I’d roll into the back lot, make my way across the courtyard (see Wurster with Campanile, the first post) and make my rounds inside the building--a stop at 232 (the ArchitectureOffice) to see if Tom was in--always anticipating our exchange--maybe Jennifer, alert and over-hours, finishing up at her desk. These hello’s were important…

Once upstairs, I’d set up my laptop on the desk near the window--always the feeling of something being centered when it was working. My “image wanders” at the beginning of the class depended on a good internet connection. (I’m recalling the years when none of this was possible--if I wanted to share a painting, I’d need to have a slide in the tray--even the stack loader didn’t expedite the process that much. Always dreamed of a time when you could think of a painting--and show it, almost in the same instant. Now to an amazing degree, that’s possible. And most of the time I think it’s wonderful--but always with those lingering doubts that too much is available--or that the very availability somehow takes away from the value of the work (the preciousness, I was going to say)--so that I’d throw in the provisos about how important it was to see the work itself--except that I wasn’t living by my own advice!

So, here above, in the photo, I was trying to make a connection that re-founded these images. Not depending on reproductions but on the things themselves. I’d chosen a number of important objects (wrong word!) from my office upstairs--the same set of things I’ve photographed and written written about in these posts. Here are the woolen socks that Amber once brought me from Chile (see Chiloe post). I’d brought them downstairs to Room 170 to show the students. Along with the stack of books (each one important to me) and the examples of the paper-made-soft project that came from some earlier time (almost always the way I’d open a new class). The gathering of twigs part of it, too. (See Crushed Paper post.) And the small flat box wrapped in brown paper tape (another Dubovsky trademark) (see Redemption post.) Each of these things a kind of bridge or touchstone, gathered from before, which seemed (felt) significant--emblematic of the experience of beholding them (maybe primarily in my own life?)--and all of which I’d gathered up in that flimsy CopyCentral manuscript box, at the last moment, to carry downstairs. The idea being I’d share them with the students--share these important objects-which-contained-moments…

But the insistence--the willfulness on my part (Philip Guston: A painting can’t be willed--one of my touchstone quotes) made the sharing impossible. The connections I’d wanted to carry across felt as if they’d been lost immediately-or not there to be made. I think you can see this on everyone’s face. The group is listening attentively, and watching, not sure where I’m going with this, but giving me the benefit of the doubt as they follow along. All Berkeley grad students, of course, so the curve is fairly high--and they are interested--it’s just that this whole business can be hard to understand.

I tried to write about it, years ago. About 1978, I think. Upstairs room on Miramar--a set of notes that I put together under the word Tone. Maybe a bit like what the philosophy people would do when they added that asterisk to one of their terms in question--a way of setting it apart slightly--making clear that we were talking about meaning, not use…

It’s forever complicated--a kind of ongoing and wonderful challenge--to address this experience--to attempt to share it. Like sharing what’s most alive.

And thereby both beautiful--and impossible. Impossibly beautiful, perhaps…

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Vreni

Vreni Michelini-Castillo

Vreni. I’m not really sure why I start with this, except that it’s something Vreni made during that first México class together, in the Spring of 2013. (VS185X: Songs & Places: México.) I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was Vreni’s presence that made the whole thing work--her willingness to reach out (reach across) just as I was trying to do--that she could accept the gesture on its own terms--that we were creating this beautiful thing--the moments in that class--very much together. I’m forever agradecido! It happened initially with the songs--las canciones--which were all of course from México. I’d chosen them from that edad de oro when the popular songs seemed to represent the entire culture--to speak for all of México.

And Vreni had learned them just that way--early on, as a girl, in Guanajuato, at the knees of her abuela. Just as it’s supposed to happen!

She was here in Berkeley as a grad student in the MFA program, and they’re given her the White Room, tucked away at the end of the downstairs hall--a long wall on which she’d draw, write, inscribe, attach, transform--I remember walking in there the first time, and Vreni’s wall was like a living creature--a kind of signboard or carapace for Vreni herself--the things she touched, thought about, wanted to hold, to look at, to describe. To share. And when it came time for her show in the UAM (the old University Art Museum) Vreni insisted that the entire wall be moved intact from the basement of Wurster into the museum gallery space. Which the powers that be finally agreed to. The show was Vreni’s!

 That same late afternoon, before the opening, we all sat in the garden in back of the museum, together with--yes, Vreni’s abuela--who had made the trip from México to be with her nieta. And we sang all the songs--Mauricio and I playing guitars, all of us singing together. The versions a mixture of how we each knew them--something Vreni had also taught me--about a certain acceptance of each other--a flexibility--and again, a reaching out.

 The songs themselves--as with so much in the culture of México--have a beautiful formality. José Alfredo’s Ella--which everyone knows--and yet there’s a common ground, too, in the ways we now know them together. Maybe thank Chavela for this--at the outset--her struggles, her own beautiful insistence…

 _____

 I must thank Valdemar for his part in this, too--the success of that time together--where his spirit as a poet (as well as a maker)--and what he always so generously shared with us of his own culture (the film footage with the indigenous farmers speaking in their own language about the meaning of maíz) and his smile (in the face of many hardships) may that smile find new ways to continue…
_____

If Vreni brought her songs, and her wonderfully inventive focus as an artist, Valde provided another kind of center that semester. He’d written me prior, of course—wanting to take the class to explore something he felt he had inside him—that artist part, never tried because in México there hadn’t been a place for it. Perhaps now, with this unusual Visual Studies experiment of ours… His first projects—I remember them quite clearly—were words written on pieces of cardboard. For Valde, the words were what was real. His bridge into a class where people painted and drew. And soon enough, after a few sessions, images began to emerge as well—not a surprise, really, given Valde’s responsive imagination. And we all came to very much appreciate these diminutive painting adventures he’d bring in each week.. But for me, even more, was Valde’s critical presence—his degree was from the UNAM, he read widely, and I knew I could trust him as a measure of whether we were on track—insofar as the questions to ask, and how to get things right (which essay by Carlos Monsiváis, or why Octavio Paz needed some hard questioning, too.) And more than the ideas was Valde’s face—I knew his expression in itself would tell us whether we were getting this México thing right. For after all, the challenges of entering into another culture—that sense of reaching across—was the essence of the course. As much a poetic balance as one of ideas...

______

Vreni’s Plate. Spontaneous, made by hand, and (each new element) linked to something else that already exists. Which might indeed be a definition of Vreni herself--or of any of us, for that matter. Here the tender scratchy pencil drawing is the spontaneous part--on what looks to be a painted circle of white gesso (gesso always taking the pencil nicely, something Vreni would know--this is where her skill fits in.) Nothing is centered--the white disk on its tan ground, the two fitted casually onto a (beautiful) ceramic plate. Did Vreni paint that, too? Somehow I think not. The plate is the “already existing” element--the world she's attached herself to--or acknowledged--vis a vis the drawing. And yet the spontaneity of the drawing is the alive part--Vreni herself (in both senses) so that the connections here continue to work in both directions. In to out, out to in. Nothing is centered--but everything seeking a center. And in that gesture, finding an even surer center…

Vreni’s precision, too, if that’s the right word. Or the sureness of her touch. The one vertical line defining the part in the girl’s hair--an axis of the world.

A dance of the unfinished…everything in the process of becoming...


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Ariel's House

Ariel's House. Casa and home, at one go. Made in the first weeks of the México class (VS185X: Songs & Places: México) in the Spring of 2013. First time I'd offered it--and all the questions were fresh, each one with a new unknown. To me as well. I remember the first night, the challenge of starting up on the first song--with a group of students many of whom came from México—at least in a family sense. But Mauricio (my great helper) had urged me beforehand—do a song first, not a recording--sing one of the songs with them... (He and I had been playing them together for a year or more by then—so the advice was well taken.) And I did...

Starting with was Ojalá que te vaya bonito, from José Alfredo Jiménez—May everything go well for you, May all your sufferings be ended, with all José Alfredo’s rhetorical flourish as he sings to a woman who’s abandoned him. The song is both tender and formal—the rhetoric itself is a part of México. The distance and the close feeling combined. And José Alfredo’s public adored him.  El hijo del pueblo… 
_____

And the Casa above. Ariel's family had come from Mexico City (referred to as D.F. in those days)--and from Russia before. Syria as well. Ariel Cherbowsky. It was a complicated, intertwined story, one that he wanted to explore. (His first project I remember was a world map with México as destination.)  I’d used the phrase, los abuelos de tus abuelos in the course description—your grandparents’ grandparents—and Ariel told me later that those were the words that reached him. Caught his imagination and made him think to join the class. That such questions could be asked, put into words, formed into images.

Just as he’s done here, with Casa--our word for the second week. Yes, a house--but also home. The fresh white clay, already cracked a bit, the plaintively scalloped roof-line (and tell me, how can a roof-line be plaintive? Only Ariel...) And then, of course, the living plants. This being his focus in school, his major in Natural Resources—Ariel’s thesis was a plan for the conservation ecology of Strawberry Canyon. So how not living plants? And at the same time, I think he probably knew that their flowering time would be brief--the green is already a touch droopy. But that has its poignancy, too. And he included the dried leaves and twigs alongside, maybe in recognition.

Both Ariel and not Ariel--a now and a never was, a present and a dream...

In a way it became a question of when to photograph. To catch this beautifully imagined casa in the moment, here on the wall of Room 170 (that's the old plywood behind)—everything still vital and alive.

I'm glad he acted! We're blessed with such moments...


____

Ariel as continues to follow this path of his--at work, holding a shoot of lupine...

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Office Again

Office Again. We're back upstairs, looking at the wall just behind my desk. Maybe you've tired of returning here, this same place, these same views? Or maybe you've entered into the mantra--as I have--where each return, each shift in view, offers another fragment--another possibility--of memory. And it is memory, to be honest--it's memory already. For the moment we step away, all that old world disappears.

Not a bad thing, really, or we'd we burdened with everything everywhere at all times. Forever. Better to be selective about when it happens. Like the locks in the Amsterdam canals, when a long motor barge appears upstream, and the gateman slowly turns his crank to let the waters rise to meet it. The Nederlanders--they engineer such things; they also make them beautiful.

Here the paintings were placed side by side, the way you see them. Not intended as a pair, necessarily, but some things do work together. The bumpy flower allusion (raw sienna, made by Golden--always right) and a woman in a space with a tree. Both emerged--that's the word. In fact, the tree is just the touch of a brush...

The crumpled newspaper. Why still there? It was brought all the way from Barcelona, the wrapping for a small glass souvenir. And why do I need a souvenir, Victor?  But he knew--he knew they'd be with me forever.

Berta's drummer, too--also from Spain. Basque in origin... His curious face (a little like Berta's own.) And the one song sheet showing on top. The focus this time is pretty good--I can read it! As in the first line--

You shall be free...


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Room 170

Room 170. The year is 2012, in the spring semester--after an evening in the Songs & Places: International class. Jashvina sent it--and I hadn't seen it for years, until now working on these posts. It's me and Rosemary McGowan, a student in the class. One of those late after-class talks where important things can be said--are often said--just because the time is so compressed. Or, it may have been not so important--something about registration or grades. But I never worried about those things --and from the way I'm standing, it feels like a significant moment. Rosemary was an independent type, in any case--her forthright posture. Scottish highlands, I'm thinking, in some previous life.

But more, what Jashvina saw here. The run of lumber there to the side, the squirrely diagrams on the chalk board, the marks on the wall--all of Wurster's roughness when glimpsed under fluorescent light. The light of day, some might say--I always preferred to get rid of them--turn off the overheads, leaving just the warm incandescent lamps on the walls. But then, I'm particular about such things. Like the way you touch someone...
____

All schools are like this, in some sense. A measure of chaos as each young person sorts things out, tries on the new. (Although on my occasional visits to a place like Yale, for example, I remember how decorously the spaces were maintained--how this was instilled.) But Wurster, no. Catch as catch can. The roughness almost celebrated--except that I think it was an unintended result. An attitude about the world...
____

Here's another photograph that Jashvina sent me--from the year she spent in South India, in the village of her family. Tamil Nadu. Her home in the states was Moscow, Idaho, so I knew this scene was a stretch. But I loved it, too. (She's there on the divan.) And I loved what Jashvina made of that time... Maybe it allowed her to also take (appreciate) a picture like the one above?

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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu. For Jashvina and her mother, living together, somewhere nearby, up on the Eunice Street hill. They made them together--these two dishes--a kind of cauliflower with cumin, and a container of small brown mushrooms, tender and whole, prepared with thin spinach leaves. Improbable colors, in their respective bowls (one of them the same as I use here, with a dark blue lid). Why was I so taken with this? Maybe the way Jashvina took the two dishes out of her bag--carried over so casually, as if the bringing of food were the world's most natural occurrence--which of course it is. I imagined them side by side, Jashvina and her mother, in a small kitchen, in a rented apartment, here in Berkeley. Not the preparation itself, but their closeness. Shared this way, with something from home... 

The taste? Simple and unadorned--yet not without a certain hint of spiciness--also simple in it's own way. As if everything else were overdone, too melodramatic (not that South India lacks for melodrama. How did Jashvina put it, "People can be  very direct...")


To be included in this--who could not love...
 






(Painting and writing, both from  2014)

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Tree

Tree. I would like this to be an homage to Wallace Berman, one of my great favorite artists. We never met, of course--he died in 1976, in a car crash in Topanga Canyon. He'd predicted it (told his mother, as a boy) that he'd die at 50. The crash was on his 50th birthday. It's a terrible story for such a beautiful man--or at least a man who could touch on such beautiful things. Berman understood the world, its underpinnings--or better, he knew that through his images he could allude to this. Also to what was beyond understanding--which was, of course, the core. Not just gambling and jazz and the roughness of city life (picture of Berman and his young family, on an broken street in Venice, CA--set against the long since vanished oil derricks. He's holding his son Tosh, his wife Shirley looks at him from alongside, not entirely easily. He's wearing a raincoat and flip-flops. It's 1956.)

The core--that's the word for Berman, the way he could form the Hebrew letters--I was always amazed--how these shapes were so clearly in his soul. Combined them and re-combined them (an ancient practice) never for meaning, but with an attention to how meaning itself might be formed (Abraham Abulafia and the tree of life-- Etz chaim hi...) Photo of him, kneeling, brush in hand, painting them on a rough white concrete wall, and the letters themselves were perfect--each one carried a universe of perfection.

Much has been made of him since (I remember the first real show, at the Whitney--where for some reason they gave the most space to his big Verifax images--which to me always seemed too repetitive, too much the same.) (Maybe New York just likes big?) But look at one of his of small beach stone gatherings, one of the stones with an aleph inscribed--painted with all the delicacy--the infinity--of time...

___

When my painter friend Wendy Sussman died, in 2001, they held a memorial for her at the old UAM (Berkeley Art Museum)--the gray concrete across from campus on Bancroft Way. Wendy had been a professor in the Art Practice Department, so there were many friends and students present. They'd asked me to be part of it--to play the concertina, somewhere in the background, and I liked the idea. (I'd done this informally at a small family memorial prior.)  In the background--that was the key. Not up on stage, as a performer, but somewhere off to the side, in one of those cavernous concrete bays. Old songs, too--from Russia and Poland--Eastern Europe--a world that lived on in the line of a chassidic melody, from Medzhybyzh, or from Pinsk. It had happened more than once--where a line from a song became a moment of discovery.

But here, a chance to touch on--invoke--a world that Wendy and I may have both understood... She'd get wonderfully excited as a teacher, gesturing to the students,  "You must go and see this...!" And her paintings--she liked that chaos, that darkness, keeping her studio lights so low that one could barely see--perhaps only time itself showing through...



(For Wallace Berman and for Wendy Sussman)
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Painting

Painting. A woman facing an expanse of the unknown. That's pretty high-fallutin' for an image on a piece of cardboard. And I’ll carp about the exposure, too—the contrast here is too high—the feeling of the original is more subtle. But there are always these questions, and what I want to get at is what it feels like to walk in here and see this again. That's what's crucial. The way a painting allows for a moment of return. Strange, too--since the experience itself is so immediate.

I put it here once, many years ago, never moved it again. (Well, slight adjustments when it's knocked over by the wind.) It's leaning back against something you don't see--a metal container--a special can of something from Maine--maple-syrup, believe it or not--from my dear pal Tim Higbee, once a student with me here, Tim went on to study lithography at Tamarind, now has a press of his own in a place called Hope. He brought me the Maine maple syrup as a gift...

And should everything find a use? Or be used, that is? I like knowing that Tim's maple-syrup can is hidden--that constitutes a use of its own. I think he'd forgive me for not putting it on pancakes--appreciate the story, no doubt.

For in the end, that's what we have--the story, of course...

___

"An expanse of the unknown"--I think I was channeling my favorite Kafka quote, from the Diaries 1910-13: "The silhouette of a man who, his arms half raised at different levels, confronts the thick mist in order to enter it."


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Blue Light

Blue Light. There can’t be enough of these—or at least I keep on taking them. The office window view at this hour, with the blue light seen though the trees. Heightened by an algorithm, no doubt--but let's not go there. We'll always have technical questions--doubts about numbers and processes--as if digital clarity could redeem us. Better the light itself, no? Our our sense of sight--I hesitate to even say it, so precious. And yet, why idealize? Wax sentimental, when what's true is the way all this looks--the line of paintings, leaned up on the edge of the desk, the hint of chair (a beautiful dull red), the one bottle, lit from the side--it's not silver, the label, but it's become silver now...

The lamp is a reflection--always a surprise, as if it were outside. But maybe best is that run of quiet--the open space on the desk--masonite, from the old days (not used much anymore)--a noble material (that would be my call), still close enough to the hand that we feel as if we know its source...

_____

My mother wrote a letter once, to the paper in Oceanside--the BladeTribune--defending the work of the architect Irving Gill. (There was a plan to demolish and replace his work with something new.) He'd designed the city library, along with other buildings in that downtown block. All with those firmly sparse arcades--touching on an image from Moorish Spain, the arches, but also very much of the present in Gill's own day. We all loved them, even without knowing it--and this is what she wanted to point out. The word she chose was quiet--how important it was, and how much we needed it. A respite, but also a focus--a focus without a center, unimposed. So that you'd feel its importance just by being there. Never overbearing--Gill's buildings allowed you to join in, to be yourself. They implied a community, a sense of dignity, even. But these last are my words. What she said was that they were quiet.  And that the quiet itself was of value, could never be replaced...


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Saki

Saki.  I remembered her name. Saki! Now why does a lively-minded Chinese-American girl studying at Berkeley choose a Japanese alcoholic beverage for her nickname? And why not? Maybe precisely because of her lively mind! It was the Songs & Places class, perhaps 2012--I don't remember the project--the song, that is, but Saki came in with this flock of pigeons. Flock of handmade pigeons--each one carefully sewn and stuffed in a precise and well-crafted manner. That was Saki--she wore her intelligence this way--a garment, of sorts--which she'd make into a reality.

She also liked letters. Type, I mean. Had the mind and the eye for it--a sense of precise detail, and a wide-ranging curiosity--so that she cared about the history--say Jan Tschichold, his Asymmetric Typography, from 1967--a book I loaned her at one point, along with several others. Very few of the students wanted to take things this far--the weekly projects kept them too involved in the now--and in any case, they were more absorbed in their own questions of creativity. But Saki would go the extra mile--she had that kind of mind--and a lyric imagination, where all her skill and precision was able to flower in the unexpected, the strangely useless--which was of course another important well of meaning...

And really, a good cloth pigeon is never useless. Look, it's sitting right here, on my desk, so that I see it everyday. Saki gave it to me, later that evening, after class--one from her own flock...


_____

And the beautiful small bottle of Nardini grappa, brought from Italy by Stefano Schiavon--a present we will one day share together!


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Fair Trade

 


 Fair Trade. One of my favorite poems, gave it to the students many times--or simply read it to them in class. Insightful, touching, accurate and subtly furious. A picture of a world, Gary Soto's own world, growing up--in Fresno, here described soon after the time of his marriage. So that the tenderness of a new life--the possibility--becomes all the more stark set against the realities that figure in the poem...(pain, love, casual indifference, anger, pride...)

Actually, furious is too strong a word (although I'm sure there were moments of fury. Bitterness as well). Gary Soto is too good a writer for that. And he loves the world too much--or better said, he loves being able to share the world--to tell its story--it's amazingly generous on his part, the way he digs into a past, salvaging gems and wreckage at one go. Facing it all. 

 His poems are true--and this is what I wanted to carry...


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Books Again

Books Again. I began these book photos to have a record of what was on my shelves, which books, and their arrangement. I did give some thought to that, but only in the act of adding a new book. (The shelves by the way, are to the other side of my desk, attached to the wall as part of the set I built for the office in the 1970’s. Probably when I realized I might be there for some time. Ric Rose, who was doing graduate work with me at the time (he now teaches at Yale and is master of their fine print set-up in the individual college houses) reminded me recently that we built the shelves together, in the Wurster shop--and that he saved a copy of my drawing--and years later built a set of his own! I was touched, both that he'd built them, and that he'd thought to tell me. It was after I sent him a link to this site...)

Arrangement. Yes that's the word, not so much order. For it was a matter of what went next to what--the sense of it, not some scheme by category. I like that the torah books are there to the left, side by side. I included them in projects many times--or sometimes just held them in my hands, to show the students their presence in my life. Then the folksongs. Alan Lomax here, because his volumes (the first, with his father, John Lomax, American Folksongs and Ballads, in 1934, revised and expanded, in edition after edition, for years to come.) I'd always loved these songs--they were a terribly meaningful layer in my life, going back to that sixth grade winter camp in Cuyamaca--the backcountry of San Diego County, high enough for snow--which made us all feel as if we were now in a real place, with deciduous trees, and winter. The counselors there would gather us in cabin song sessions that went to my core!

Jean Ritchie's paperback tucked in there, too. The spine has faded, so you can't quite read the title--Singing Family of the Cumberlands. Affecting stories of her growing-up years in Eastern Kentucky, what that life was like--her home... 

Then Mexican Folkways--a very special book which deserves a place by itself. Frances Toor, the American woman who spent decades of her life in México, an avid recorder of Mexican crafts and tradition. Not just the objects and the music and the fiesta celebrations, but how these were bound up with an ancient and very beautiful culture--one that still existed, once one ventured beyond the breakfast counter at Sanborn's in Mexico City. A picture of an entire world--a disappearing world, at precisely the moment of the changes to come. (The book was published in 1945, at the end of the War, also the year I was born.)

Then, the Norton Anthology. Another kind of bible, but this one for poems. It was referred to time and time again--especially before the internet and cellphones made everything available in the instant. A kind of standard stop, where Frank O'Hara's The Day Lady Died was always safely in its place. I never loved the layout--all the editorial bric a brac (the dates and notes and commentary)--which obscured the purity of the poems themselves, but the scope of that volume was very beautiful, always...

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One more note on the Frances Toor. In the first México class (VS 185X Songs and Places: México, SP2013) I had the students purchase the Toor book--then available quite inexpensively from online sources. I felt a little sheepish about doing this--since I was assigning a gringa as a source to all these young people, many of whose own families came from Mexican roots. No matter--I told them it was a valuable book, one they could pass on to their grandchildren. (That got them thinking!) And to make sure they'd actually ordered it, I asked them to send me a photo when the book arrived--a self portrait with Frances Toor. Along with Octavio Paz, of course--our two sources.  Here's one of my favorite's, from the wonderful Everto Gutierrez (bigote included!)--

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Skelley's Garage

Skelley's Garage. Near 30th and Upas, in San Diego. The neighborhood with its resonances, because my mother once lived on Upas Street--that would have been in the late 1920's. I can remember the way she would say the name, enjoying the up-and-down of its sound. It was a difficult time in her life--just at the beginning of the Depression, with a young daughter to raise on her own, and a secretarial job at nearby Florence Elementary school. But the principal there, Miss Nye, was a woman my mother revered, and when she'd talk about those years, Miss Nye would be mentioned first.

Miss Nye was severe, and a strict teetotaler. I remember her paying us a visit once, years later--I must have been about 6 or 7, when we lived in Kensington, a neighborhood nearby. My parents served her a glass and saucer of my father's cherry liquor (also made in the depression years)--grain alcohol was the base, and the steeped cherries were lethal. Miss Nye tasted one of them, in the saucer provided, enjoyed it (no idea about the liquor) and proceeded to eat the rest. Ah, the best of intentions. She became quite typsy. My parents, I think,  smiled...
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But this is recent. We were walking along Upas, looking to meet a group of friends at a restaurant nearby, when we came upon this place--and I was absolutely struck by the facade, that duck-bill overhang canopy roof with name and telephone number wrapping around, hand-painted--Skelley's Garage 281-1901--every bit of it makeshift and piecemeal, patched together out of sheet-metal sometime long ago, balanced on two poles, more a signboard than a shelter, but somewhere a nod to Raymond Loewy and the streamlined look of American Art Deco--industrial design, rather--the locomotive--but here that image had been foisted on an otherwise nondescript gasoline station in an obscure part of town.

Made me realize just how emblematic I found this--like some source of my own true  being. Not even what painter Israel Hershberg had railed against in Jerusalem--that quality of tachlif--substitution (which he perceived in almost all contemporary Israeli art), but here, in my own hometown, an impossible imitation, a whiff, at the most, a hint at the possibility of a history, undiscovered, unrealized--almost not even an allusion...

It's why I'd left, in 1960. I knew there had to be more in the universe than these sandy back lots and blank sunsets. But now, on return, I saw it--Skelley's also felt like home...

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Hunter

Hunter. I always avoided those professional athletes--I mean the football players and track stars who needed a get-through course. But Hunter was different. We were over-full, he was an outside major, and somehow I'd found out that he was captain of the water-polo team, so I already had my suspicions. But the intense way Hunter pursued a place in the class--the multiple notes pinned to my door (he wasn't going to leave it to email--although there was one of those, too--long and compelling--in which he told me that music (read creativity) was his life... Plus he attached two songs that were being played on radio stations in San Diego!) Already more than one reason to be intrigued. Then he arrived, lanky, very tall, the blond hair of a waterman (surfing his true passion) and a remarkable, understated presence. He became a center in the class--not by claiming the space--Hunter was actually quite modest--but because of what he made. "I'm not trained as an artist"--he let me know--but the color-embellished longboard, or the full-sized pallet-assemblage he dragged in for Missisissippi John Hurt, or his touchingly authentic paintings (Ain't No More Cane on the Brazos)--they all come immediately to mind. And his songs, of course--sometimes one would start with Hunter crouched on the floor, back against the display wall, with words pouring out, quietly, from another time, another place (his long-ago clan in Eastern Tennessee) a lullaby, barely remembered, even by Hunter, but true in every note...

He told me his whole story--all the twists, the quandaries. The setbacks, too. But overall, a beautiful and happy man...
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And I learned from him, too--something about San Diego--or maybe from San Diego--a kind of astute acceptance of the way things simply are. Hunter would return to that, often... Also a center...


(Photo above by Nelli Astvatsatrian, from the Finale evening, VS 185X: Songs & Places: American Roots,  Fall 2016. The photo below is one Hunter sent me in the week he had to miss a class...)


 

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Baylor by Kouros

Baylor by Kouros. Maybe Fall 2014, a still from a film--the semester in Songs and Places that Kouros (Kouros Alaghband--Mr. K) would make a film each week, and show it in class. We'd all be sitting around the big table (several of the maple-top tables grouped together), late in the evening--in anticipation. The hanging lamp dimmed, making for an atmosphere of arrival. Somehow it seemed right from the very get-go that Kouros' film would be the week's finale. He was meticulous in his set-up--bending over his laptop, getting the projection details ready--the same attentiveness he brought to all his work, the lighting and editing, the scripts--but the films themselves were wild. Unpredictable, engaging. His actors--or better, subjects--always members of the class. We never saw how he arranged this, but when the week's offering began--there was the person we all knew, now transformed into one or another mythic being--as above, with Baylor, who had become the essential 19-year old underground man--as recaptured in a cafe in Berkeley. Alternative substances (liquid, powder), yes, and often music (the week's song), these invented character studies were beautiful and revealing. (Noor with an ancient accordion--we're looking down at her toes--who turns and dives from a low cliff into the cobalt waters of Lake Anza--it's a beautiful winter morning, very cold, with tall, shadowy sunlit trees.)  Everyone loved them--and not just because they were home grown. It was obvious that Mr. K. would pursue this for the rest of his days...

And that we might, too...


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And Baylor, of course , who brings his own story. The Woody Guthrie show at Cal (Baylor as one of the Woody's), and his own personal songs--the way he'd sing them for us those S&P evenings, impelled, compelled, propelled. Always a mystery, their Baylor source.  I'd told him I expected work on the wall as well (even though he came as a music man) so after one mad self-portrait on crumpled paper, Baylor, over the following weeks, would nail a shoe to the wall--a soft, Berkeley-student flat-soled slipper type shoe, quite well-worn) marking the spot where he would later stand and sing...! Theater being always a wonderful part of the Baylor persona...


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Office Door

My Office Door.  It's a blurry hallway--the iPad jiggled--but that may be fitting, given the time of evening and the shadows. I like the way the dark pulls in and almost makes the bottom of the door disappear. Often these shots are too bright, too clear--which misses the actual experience. Here the can light has been pointed down onto the plywood wall--and the wood itself never seems to look wrong. In fact, being surrounded by those plywood walls is a key part of Wurster, and, to my mind, one of Esherick's great choices in designing the place (I'm thinking the plywood was his choice.) Also, someone told me once that he imagined all the partition walls as moveable--so that studio set-ups could be flexible and responsive. Some of the big sliding doors in classrooms on the fourth floor were an echo of this.

But the world became less flexible--or maybe it never was, really--and spaces became proprietary. Property, after a fashion.

The postings here are my course flyers--the VS280 Grad Seminar: Beginnings, and the VS185X Songs & Places classes (American Roots, México and such--we did Russia and Argentina as well--and an International Edition, in Spring 2012.) I always liked that the write-ups were there on display for perusal by passers-by--got some interesting students that way. And of course by word-of-mouth-- "My friend so-and-so told me about the class...!" There's also an old ED11A Ancestral Realm flyer--from 2009, last time I did the course), and on the far right, a sheaf of copies with an elaborate list of relevant courses elsewhere on campus--ones that would be of interest to Visual Studies people. It was a long list--I've always seen the field (the endeavor, better) as inclusive. So why not  East Asian Languages and Cultures 103: Writing, Visuality, and the Powers of Images, or French 175A:  Literature and the Visual Arts--or Film185: The Language of Cinema. Not to mention Alexi Yurchak's Anthropology 152: Art and Culture, or Paul Rabinow, Anthropology of the Contemporary...(all courses offered at the time.)

The wall is a bit bare now--the mooncake box is no longer there above my name plate, nor some of the quirky notes from students, often dashed off in ballpoint on lined paper torn out of a binder notebook and tucked under my door. Swoosh, they'd be there on the floor when I'd open it, about to walk in...


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First of May

First of May. A beautiful late afternoon, on the first day in May. Pierwszego Maja, in Warsaw of the 1960’s—the workers’ holiday, as I well remember it, established soon after WWII. High-contrast image of the face of Lenin on a gigantic red banner. But in reality an American tradition—the International Workers’ Day, dating back to the 1880s. Associated with the Haymarket protests in Chicago, and the travails of early union organizing.

Hard to remember that here, with the gentle light through eucalyptus branches. A beautiful setting can mask all manner of sins. Make our errors feel like virtues. (I'm not referring to Lenin, by the way.) The main one here being that nothing has been moved yet—but we’re early in the process, and these notes (I hope!) will help preparing the way. The problem is that everything in this place is laden—too many years of strong connections—and I’ve kept it all intact. I can point to almost anything here and find traces of meaning—a story, a personal connection. Which is beautiful, but also in its own way a burden. How to move forward. (Впериот! Another Soviet usage...) So maybe by writing—together with the pictures—that is, writing in relation the the pictures (for I’ve done each of these posts by starting with the image, letting the text follow…) things will open up…

Open up—yes, a good phrase…and my own...

Anything new here? Well, the camera’s pulled back, so you get a sense of the physical space. And then there’s the desk chair, an old university model that continues to make me feel very much at home. The red naugahyde—and it rolls! Also, leaning against the window wall—a pallet on wheels, with pieces of carpet for padding—saved from the last time I moved these things. Twenty years back. May prove handy again…

Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!

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Hannah's Flowers

Hannah's Flowers. Looked for this, didn't know I'd find an image, other than in my imagination. Or memory, perhaps... The photo is a frame from a video--made on one of the nights of the Songs & Places class in Fall 2011. A crucial time (they all are, but that semester particularly so) because it began just when my dear Betsy was at the most difficult stage in her illness. They'd urged me, in her room at Alta Bates, "Go on up to school. Don't worry, we'll take good care of her." Such close and valiant people, those nurses and MA's. It was late August, right at the beginning of the semester--the first night of class. I had a song list in my pocket, written out on the back of one of the hospital orders. Not much more. It's the list I've gone back to ever since--when I feel I need to start with the essential.

Walking into 170 that evening. New faces gathered around the table, expectant. I remember saying to them, at the very outset, "This class will be a lifeline--for me and for you both. In ways we don't even know..."

Then there were our songs. Down in the Valley, Rock Island Line, Mary Don't You Weep, Goodnight Irene. Our bedrock--a foothold and a ledge. We moved from one to the next, through those first weeks. The end came a month later, in Week 4: Oh Mary Don't You Weep. The Spirituals. It seemed so fitting. I went away, to New York, for the service--then returned (Anthony had covered for me with the class.) And that night, as I walked in, there on the table under the hooded lamp, a branch with flowers. Different each week, from that time on. Hannah would bring them, gathered on her way in to school. Unannounced, she never said a word--the flowered branch--there in the lamplight. A gift.

It's a sunflower here--so appropriate. And someone's hands--in a gesture of opening. Also appropriate. And the song, right at the end of the evening--Goodnight, Irene...

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Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dw4c2-NLF0 

Written and posted on My 17, 2019, Betsy's birthday.    Thank you, Hannah, and thank you Anthony! And of course thanks to Max Chanowitz on the accordion...
 

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San Miguel

San Miguel. A bedroom in in San Miguel--sent to us by Sara (Sara Wildavsky). It was the México class, in 2017, she'd volunteered--our foreign correspondent, perhaps--living in San Miguel, she'd go out and record the town. A very good eye--I loved getting them every few days--Sara's photographs, as if we were right there alongside--all the things you see when you don't plan the view, the details of an encounter with daily life. Sara very good at this, out of her own necessity. She'd been here once--at Cal, I mean--the friends and connections still strong. So that when she wrote--a kind of long-distance auditor--of course I said yes.

ED11A years back--Sara was in the group. Along with William (see painting below) and Kevin and friends. Wildavsky became Wild, for a time--also out of necessity--and then the music followed--a salsa career of her own invention. (Salsa trombone!) The paintings, too--one a day, I understand. It's a tradition.

Thank you Sara. The class loved you. These were more important than you knew...

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(The class: VS 185X: Songs & Places: México)


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Embrace

Embrace. Living is round--that was Jean-Paul's phrase, in a beautiful book on African spaces. But here we embrace in a time of challenge--it's November 2016, election night, and Jeremy (wonderful Jeremy, his head lowered on the right) has checked his phone, it's 8:05 and the news is grim. The things we value--argue for and defend--none of them come free. Even if freedom itself is their very source. You see that here, on the faces--as if in prayer--and maybe we are, for prayer has brought us close.

Is that true, really? Maybe it's the absence of prayer--more a daily resolve--to be good, to be kind, to take the other into account. Into your arms, even, when need be.

A drawing can do this, a painting, too. Any of the things we form with our hands--letting each line, each gesture and form, find it's own endearing truth.

It's very own...


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