Monday, December 31, 2012

"For last year's words belong to last year's language...



And next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning." 
 ~ T.S. Eliot



"May you always have walls for the winds,
a roof for the rain, tea beside the fire,
laughter to cheer you, those you love near you,
and all your heart might desire."--An  Irish blessing



It's a nice dream I think.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Don't Worry About Me

"When the twilight shadows fall
and the nocturnal creatures call
from the place where you are,
Still! I see you in each star.
So, please don't worry about me?

When the song birds awaken the dawn
and the starry night is gone,
Though I wander ways apart,
where the shadows stir and start,
Still! I will hold you in my heart.
So, please don't worry about me?"

Joseph T. Renaldi


Thursday, November 29, 2012

Lin Tianmiao - Artist


Bound Unbound

7 September 2012 - 27 January 2013





"One of Lin Tianmiao’s clearest recollections of her childhood in China was helping her mother sew clothes for the family. When she returned to China after spending eight years living in New York, she was inspired by this memory to create a technique she calls thread winding, where she winds silk or cotton thread around an object until it is completely covered and ultimately transformed. She used this in one of her first major works calledThe Proliferation of Thread Winding in 1995, which began her career as an artist and is included in the exhibition. Her use of the technique continues today and can be seen in such recent works as All the Same.





Lin Tianmiao’s paintings, sculptures, and installations have always been about a series of dual tensions. These are frequently played out in her works through contrasts between materials, but they are also evident in binary themes such as male versus female, function versus form, and physical versus psychological experience. Underlying all of these themes is a keen exploration of a physical experience, at times emphasizing the female body. We see this in the works Chatting and Mothers!!!.
Lin is one of only a handful of women artists of her generation born in the 1960s to have emerged during the 1990s when the Chinese art world was coming of age and gaining substantial international recognition. Her works over the past twenty years are as much about her personal journey as an artist as they are about a desire to articulate broader social issues. Through her focus on a female experience, she comments on the enormous social progress made in Chinese society during Mao Zedong’s tenure, yet she hints that some promises remain unfulfilled. Her consistent exploration of these issues, sometimes latent, makes her a significant artist of our time. This exhibition represents Lin Tianmiao’s first major solo exhibition in the United States.
Bound Unbound: Lin Tianmiao is part of Asia Society's yearlong programmatic focus on China, titled China Close Up."






Exhibit:
725 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021
+212-288-6400



Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Houseboat Days






Saying It To Keep It From Happening


Some departure from the norm
Will occur as time grows more open about it.
The consensus gradually changed; nobody
Lies about it any more. Rust dark pouring
Over the body, changing it without decay—
People with too many things on their minds, but we live
In the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling,
Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousness
And the other livers of it get off at the same stop.
How careless. Yet in the end each of us
Is seen to have traveled the same distance—it’s time
That counts, and how deeply you have invested in it,
Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it 
were
The same as making it happen. You’re not sorry,
Of course, especially if this was the way it had to happen,
Yet would like an exacter share, something about time
That only a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it
means.
It is a long field, and we know only the far end of it,
Not the part we presumably had to go through to get there.
If it isn’t enough, take the idea
Inherent in the day, armloads of wheat and flowers
Lying around flat on handtrucks, if maybe it means more
In pertaining to you, yet what is is what happens in the end
As though you cared. The event combined with
Beams leading up to it for the look of force adapted to the 
wiser
Usages of age, but it’s both there
And not there, like washing or sawdust in the sunlight,
At the back of the mind, where we live now.” 


John Ashbery




Saturday, November 10, 2012

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Realism in a time of Expressionism: August Sander


Denying tonality as a principle, without formality to replace it. Expressionism. A world phenomena of artists who would go beyond natural appearances to put forward the inner meaning. Expressing elemental feelings rather than a description of the visible world. In contrast to these ideals August Sander who lived from 1876 to 1964 would remain a realist. A portraitist in a time of artistic coercion, documenting every day German life during great tyranny.

Many plates were destroyed under Nazi regime for failing to portray Aryan sensibilities. Some precious negatives and plates would be saved after the war. Therefore, looking at the faces that remain, perhaps one can see beyond the posed figures and into the expression of a climate less conducive of emotion.




When you look into this stunning gelatin silver print you see a young man posing who perhaps, given the way in which he is dressed could be of some social standing. The look in his eyes tell the infinite story.



Sander held a heartfelt fascination with circus people. As one historian puts it, " a suggestive, almost tantalizing narrative unfolds: of freedom and confinement, security and danger, things visible and hidden."


August Sander

Facial language in a Sander portrait is not only hypnotic it poses a tale of reflection. 

August Sander would go on to influence artists such as, Edward Steichen and Diane Arbus. A collection of August Sander's works can be found in a permanent exhibit at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. 



I originally wrote this for Imeem. 

Monday, November 5, 2012

longing to dissolve

I listened to this in a darkened room laying on the floor with my tablet tucked under my chin as the volume pulsed into my chest.



Thanks to Betina

Friday, November 2, 2012

resurrection of a poem fragment



"Of human deeds divine in all but name,

Was it not worth a little hour or more

To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came

To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be

You love not me?" --Thomas Hardy

Sarah Moon

seen in new light


thanks to Sol who played this with the show giving beautiful light...  















Thursday, November 1, 2012

a quote




“If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.”


― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

****contrasted gallery

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Shaman and Poe


The Village Street

In these rapid, restless shadows,
Once I walked at eventide,
When a gentle, silent maiden,
Walked in beauty at my side.
She alone there walked beside me
All in beauty, like a bride.
Pallidly the moon was shining
On the dewy meadows nigh;
On the silvery, silent rivers,
On the mountains far and high,--
On the ocean's star-lit waters,
Where the winds a-weary die.
Slowly, silently we wandered
From the open cottage door,
Underneath the elm's long branches
To the pavement bending o'er;
Underneath the mossy willow
And the dying sycamore.

With the myriad stars in beauty
All bedight, the heavens were seen,
Radiant hopes were bright around me,
Like the light of stars serene;
Like the mellow midnight splendor
Of the Night's irradiate queen.
Audibly the elm-leaves whispered
Peaceful, pleasant melodies,
Like the distant murmured music
Of unquiet, lovely seas;
While the winds were hushed in slumber
In the fragrant flowers and trees.
Wondrous and unwonted beauty
Still adorning all did seem,
While I told my love in fables
'Neath the willows by the stream;
Would the heart have kept unspoken
Love that was its rarest dream!

Instantly away we wandered
In the shadowy twilight tide,
She, the silent, scornful maiden,
Walking calmly at my side,
With a step serene and stately,
All in beauty, all in pride.

Vacantly I walked beside her.
On the earth mine eyes were cast;
Swift and keen there came unto me
Bitter memories of the past--
On me, like the rain in Autumn
On the dead leaves, cold and fast.

Underneath the elms we parted,
By the lowly cottage door;
One brief word alone was uttered--
Never on our lips before;
And away I walked forlornly,
Broken-hearted evermore.

Slowly, silently I loitered,
Homeward, in the night, alone;
Sudden anguish bound my spirit,
That my youth had never known;
Wild unrest, like that which cometh
When the Night's first dream hath flown.
Now, to me the elm-leaves whisper
Mad, discordant melodies,
And keen melodies like shadows
Haunt the moaning willow trees,
And the sycamores with laughter
Mock me in the nightly breeze.

Sad and pale the Autumn moonlight
Through the sighing foliage streams;
And each morning, midnight shadow,
Shadow of my sorrow seems;
Strive, O heart, forget thine idol!
And, O soul, forget thy dreams! 

The Village Street by Edgar Allan Poe
Photographs by Evgeniy Shaman

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

a poem

The Music Box

Music of Japan. Parsimoniously
from the water clock the drops unfold
in lazy honey or ethereal gold
that over time reiterates a weave
eternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright.
I fear that every one will be the last.
They are a yesterday come from the past.
But from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight
garden, what vigils by an unknown sea,
and from what modest melancholy, from
what lost and rediscovered afternoon
do they arrive at their far future: me?
Who knows? No matter. When I hear it play
I am. I want to be. I bleed away.

by Jorge Luis Borges
1899–1986

Translated from the Spanish by Tony Barnstone


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Translator's Note: Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges was unapologetic about his sonnets. He liked his rhymes to be true, and he liked to create sentences the size of stanzas in order to emphasize the sonnet’s modular structure. Borges also made it clear that he expected the same dedication and craft from his translators, that he did not want his sonnets translated into loosened form or into free verse. (His comment on such translations was simple: “Try harder.”)

My love affair with Borges’s sonnets goes back to my earlier love affair with his fabulist fiction. I love how he uses the sonnet as a machine for thinking, for literary and philosophical games, and I love finding the poems populated by my old friends: the tigers, riddles, labyrinths, and mirrors that recur so often in his prose. Borges is not merely a philosophical poet; he is a visionary one. When the poet addresses “the One Who is Reading Me,” his imagination travels to the future, where a marble tombstone awaits the reader. Paradoxically, the reader is posited to be a dream of time, a changing river draining irreversibly toward the sea (death), and yet also invulnerable because of the certainty that he or she will become dust: who can kill the dust?

In “Music Box,” the dripping golden music carries the poet’s imagination to a past Japan of mountain shrines and unknown seas, and in that astral projection the poet finds himself bleeding away into time, like music. How else to capture this vision except in the music box of the sonnet, whose hidden gears turn to make the music chime and keep time?

Of course, we can’t keep time in a box; time has a box prepared for us. Understanding this is what allows us to value what life we have. My father tells a story about Borges. One day the great man was walking down the streets of Buenos Aires when a man rushed up to him and exclaimed, “Borges, you are immortal!” Borges, with his characteristic dry wit, replied, “Don’t be so pessimistic.” —Tony Barnstone



This poem originally appeared in the March 2012 issue of Poetry magazine




Monday, October 22, 2012

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Friday, October 12, 2012

8th Anniversary Open Studios



Flyer
Directors of Santa Monica Art Studios Yossi Govrin and Sherry Frumkin are pleased to announce the 8th Anniversary Celebration of their project of artist studios and exhibition space in an historic 22,000 square foot hangar.

Event:
Saturday, October 13th from 6 to 9 pm 
Sunday, October 14th from 1 to 5 pm

More than 36 painters, printmakers, photographers, sculptors and mixed media artists will open their studios for the event.

Artists include: Francisco Alarcon, Melinda Smith Altshuler, Fariba Ameri, Krista Augius, Janet Bothne, Gregg Chadwick, Lauren Chase, Claudia Concha, Lola del Fresno, Wendy Edlen, Susan Feldman, Karen Florek, Mitchell Friedman, Judith Golden, Yossi Govrin, Rachel Grynberg, Amy Jean Boebel, Sally Lamb, David Leeds, Maddy Le Mel, Luigia Martelloni, Christine McLaughlin, Jackie Nach, Sabine Pearlman, Kathy Peck, Olaf Pooley, Richard Rogg, Paula Rosen, Linda Sher Salzman, Gwen Samuels, Rachel Shultz, Diane Silver, Pamela Simon-Jensen, Doni Silver Simons, Julie Weiss, Karen V. Woo and Joan Wulf.



Santa Monica Art Studios
3026 Airport Avenue
Santa Monica, CA 90405
Phone: 310.397.7449 Fax: 310.397.7459

Thursday, October 11, 2012

more of Annie


because i love this girl!











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with David Byrne



Monday, October 8, 2012

a poem

UNFLEDGING

Hold the bird in the left hand, and commence
to pull off the feathers from under the wing.
Having plucked one side, take the other wing
and proceed in the same manner, until all the feathers
are removed.
- Mrs Beeton’s Household Management



I raise Paisley wounds,
spill yellow pollen of fat.
This is reversing time, like a vandal

who scores shellac blooms
from a soundbox, tightening to snapping
the strings of a lute.

As if I scraped a poem’s lard
from vellum. As brattish
as kicking a cat.

In pale skin are magnolia buds:
the muscles that worked wings,
but I’ve undone the wings,

gripping each pinion
as if to slide home the marriage ring
and never dream of flying again;

I’ve plucked the eyed, seed feathers,
the chicky down, the fine human hair
like first casing of mushroom spawn,

the long quills that striped across
the evening sun this week,
trembling in the rainstorm’s target.
© 2005, Jen Hadfield
From: Almanacs
Publisher: Bloodaxe, 2005

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

in your eyes... in your memory...

witch,
with all those ugly bits


Monday, September 17, 2012

I Am Vertical


"But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimallight of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me."

by Sylvia Plath





Tuesday, September 11, 2012

“In A New York Minute” by Roger Guetta


“In A New York Minute” by Roger Guetta

(9/11 Tribute)

In a heartbeat, we entered the realm of the melancholy,
In a wink of an eye, we found ourselves at the edge of the abyss,
In a sneaking suspicion, we uttered true lies.
In a moment in time, we lost our balance,
In a glimmer of hope, we were swept away,
In a last gasp, we grew weary,
In a lasting desire, we lay naked,
In a sequence of events, we lost our rhythm,
In making due, we compromised our dignity,
In a New York minute, we faced unspeakable truths,
In a split second, we accommodated a solemn thought,
In a broken promise, we understood our fragility,
In a slim chance, we rolled snake eyes,
In a forced grin, we encountered our double,
In a double take, we fixated our eyes on the sublime,
In a round about way, we made peace with ourselves,
In a false step, we heard ourselves falter,
In dire straights, we rebounded to live another day,
In resisting temptation, we became God’s savior,
In seizing the moment, we set the record straight,
In tempting fate, we lagged behind the running pack,
In tuning in, we arrested our development,
In twisting the truth, we fell prey to untold misery,
In breaking new ground, we lost our footing,
In flirting with disaster, we landed on our asses,
In a solemn oath, we deceived our own shadows,
In the eye of the storm, we captured our enigmatic spirits,
but lost them again during the calming,
In the depths of despair, we muscled our way to the front of the line,
In a stroke of luck, we lived the moment,
In a silent prayer, we forced a smile,
In a lingering thought, we assumed the position,
and didn’t dare lift a finger
In calculating our every move, we faced our shortcomings,
In sensing danger, we reached in our pockets and made no sudden moves,
In embracing religion, we became zealots,
In rejecting religion, we became careful,
In acts of generosity, we let things slide,
we let them slip,
we let them sail,
never asking anything in return,
In fine form, we insulted a humble soul.
The humble soul remains us.

Quebec/Canada

courtesy of the The Juice Bar

Monday, September 10, 2012

Jessica Silversaga - Photographer





"september is a month like any other and unlike any other. it seems in september everything awaited will arrive: in the calm air, in a particular scent, in the stillness of the quay. when september comes, i know i’m going to lose myself.". -- From 'memory of water' by Reina María Rodriguez.

Friday, September 7, 2012

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

a poem

This Was Once a Love Poem


by Jane Hirshfield

This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.

It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.

Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.

IT spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.

The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.

Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them—one, then another—
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.

Monday, September 3, 2012

PRECIPICE



"The border
of a thing.

Its edge
or hem.

The selvage,
the skirt,

a perimeter’s
trim.




The blow
of daylight’s

end and
nighttime’s

beginning.



A fence

or a rim,
a margin,

a fringe.
And this:

the grim,
stingy

doorstep
where

the lapse
of passage

happens.
That slim

lip of land,
the liminal

verge
that slips

you past
your brink.

Where
and when

you
blink."

© 2011, Jill Alexander Essbaum
From: Poetry, Vol. 197, No. 4, January, 2011


Monday, August 27, 2012

Yossi Govrin - Artist

Last Wednesday I took a drive over to Santa Monica Art Studios to sneak a peak at the LA Mobile Arts Festival.  I had the pleasure of running into Yossi Govrin as he was placing his art work outside the door of his studio.  He took me inside and showed me a family of immense human statues adorn with chandeliers a sight of such whimsy and modern art my heart almost stopped beating.  He was kind enough to let me take his picture among his treasured work.  Thank you Yossi, it was an enormous pleasure for me. 



"Yossi Govrin has exhibited nationally and internationally, working in multiple media. In the "Night Watch" series the sculptures relate directly to "human conductivity" and are made from hemp and cement; emphasizing the transient nature of humans and their environment, and a single mold reflecting our common origin. The added elements such as chandeliers, stones, and rope reintroduce the sense of individuality and uniqueness and resonate across cultural and national boundaries. These themes are revisited in his other series of work, such as "Sky Dancers", and "Random Flight".
He has been awarded numerous commissions, among them a monument in honor of the late Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin (installed in Rabin Square, Tel Aviv City Hall, the site of the Prime Minster's assassination) and the bust of General James H. Doolittle, placed at the Santa Monica Museum of Aviation.
ARTIST STUDIOS/ ARENA 1
In 1985 Yossi Govrin conceived and designed his first art center, the Santa Monica Fine Art Studios, located at 1834 Franklin Street. It arose out of a personal need to obtain a work space with a sense of community that is inspiring, supportive, and dynamic. Thus the 10,000 sq.ft studio was created to include 35 artist studios, workshops/lectures as well as annual exhibitions.
Another dream in the making for many years, was that of an exhibition space devoted to cutting edge contemporary art, with an invitational curatorial program. A place to exhibit local and international artists, and to be a catalyst and educational tool for the center and for the art community in large. This became Arena 1, the gallery situated in the midst of the spacious artist studios. In 2003, Yossi Govrin was joined by Sherry Frumkin to create the new and exciting Santa Monica Art Studios, located in the heart of Santa Monica Airport."









Additional pictures from,  http://yossigovrin.com/
Text from,  http://www.santamonicaartstudios.com/yossi_bio.htm

Santa Monica Art Studios
3026 Airport Avenue
Santa Monica, CA 90405
Phone: 310.397.7449 Fax: 310.397.7459
Public Hours: Wednesday through Saturday 12 to 6



Saturday, August 25, 2012

a poem


WOULD-LAND




5 AM. One-quarter past.
Distant chimes inform me this.

A bell peal knells the mist.
And sunlight’s

not yet bludgeoning.
But some light gets blood going.

Last night it was snowing
and now

every path’s a pall.
Though mine the only footfalls

at this hour of awe. Above
hangs a canopy of needle leaf.

Below, the season’s
mean deceit—

that everything stays
white and clean.

It doesn’t, of course,
but I wish it. My prayers

are green with this intent,
imploring winter wrens

to trill and begging scuttling bucks
come back.

There’s something that I lack.
A wryneck

bullet-beaks a branch.
His woodworm didn’t have a chance.

What I miss,
I’ve never had.

But I am not a ghost.
I am a guest.

And life is thirst,
at best.

So do not strike me, Heart.
I am, too, tinder.

I’m flammable
as birch bark, even damp.

Blue spruce, bee-eater—
be sweeter to me.

Let larksong shudder
to its January wheeze,

but gift these hands a happiness
just once.

It is half passed.
And I am cold.

Another peal has tolled.
I’ve told the sum of my appeals.

I need not watch for fox.
They do not congregate at dawn.

But I would,
were I one.

© 2011, Jill Alexander Essbaum
From: Poetry, Vol. 197, No. 4, January, 2011




Thursday, August 23, 2012

.

Abigail Berenika











nothing feels right










to love a picture



"my feelings toward your picture are none of your business"

“i just love your picture, not you. perhaps you would ruin all of my dreams, so i dont want you as i only know your photo”

Thanks to Ozkan

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

well played

I think you're finally rid of me.
Took a village, didn't it though?
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This gorgeous image is by LiLiROZE
and the quote is by Poe.




“From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.” ― Edgar Allan Poe