millenial western sketch

FAUX Modern Listings

Dec 30  mid century modern chicken house (Pasadena) pic map
Dec 30   faux marble industrial rabbit cage (Highland Park) pic map
Dec 29   brand new convertible coop - lobster red (Culver City) pic map
Dec 29   4 soft modern collection egg laying hens (Santa Monica) pic map
Dec 29   small gold poultry cage (DTLA) pic map
Dec 28   like new Eames-style chicks (Los Feliz) pic map
Dec 28   decorative round cement (Silverlake) pic map
Dec 28  faux mongolian lamb pouf covers (West Hollywood) pic map

LA 2017

( search and you will find )
( an end is a beginning    )
( the harvest moon wanes   )
--------------------------

cui bono?

Neck muscles tensing, cringing, and a gut feeling; now is not the time to maintain momentary peace. To keep momentary peace is to sacrifice the peace of an invisible majority and to delay the release that comes with honesty. Often guised in a language of objectivity, group supremacy is an intelligent and active decision to uphold the loss of life through the taking of life. Life as authority, material, territory, and energy. 

Take a position, I was told, and now I'm beginning to understand why. It's a delay otherwise. Whether right or wrong, if you don't take a position, you're not going anywhere. For whose benefit?

fuel, wind, dryness, topography, and ignition

s c r e e n

on    electrified                planes         of     light

    on                electrified          waves   of        sound

infinitely               static

              definitely         illusory

nouns      things          

         text          textures

splashes of lovely clear sky

BOOK The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck, 1947

"The sky was beginning to clear. The clouds were tattering and there were splashes of lovely clear sky with silks of cloud skittering across them. Up high a fierce wind blew, spreading and mixing and matting the clouds, but on the ground the air was perfectly still, and there was a smell of worms and wet grass and exposed roots."

hilarious world

PODCAST The Hilarious World of Depression via American Public Media

ancient, dusky rivers

POEMS Langston Hughes Reads Langston Hughes

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

It is Margaret you mourn for

POEM Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1880

to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

the void we avoid

I exist.

It is soft, so soft, so slow. 
And light: 
it seems as though it suspends in the air. 
It moves. 

- Jean-Paul Sartre

not impossible

All of a sudden the wall at the end -
it appears, too clear.

Agnes Dene's Manifesto from 1969
working with a paradox
defining the elusive
visualizing the invisible
communicating the incommunicable
not accepting the limitations society has accepted
seeing in new ways
living for a fraction of a second and penetrating light years
using intellect and instinct to achieve intuition
achieving total self-consciousness and self-awareness
being creatively obsessive
questioning, reasoning, analysing, dissection and re-examining
understanding the finitude of human existence and still striving to create
beauty and provocative reasoning
finding new concepts, recognising new patterns
desiring to know the importance or significance of existence
seeing reality and still being able to dream
persisting in the eternal search

self-correcting maladjustment

QUOTE from Democracy by Joan Didion, 1984

...as the granddaughter of a geologist I learned early to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands... A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress, and ego may be a similar accommodation. A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure, and so, for all I know, is technique.

find me in the desert
half prepared, thirsty, thirty

sensory poem

FOUND a poem on the shelf

The drumming of ping pong balls
Mysterious, greenish
The chewing of ice
River
Smooth like a desert
Raw, green, heavy
Like the relief of oxygen after drowning

Clean and new like a new sheet of paper
Smooth as water
Like walking on the clouds with my eyes closed

The missing flavor like missing a right shoe
Dreamy like sleeping after staying up until three in the morning

Magical Thinking

BOOK The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)

"I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead."

h  e  a  r    t o    p  e  n

12 x 12

twelve

months

make

a year

and

twelve

years

makes

it home

self-respect

ESSAY On Self-Respect by Joan Didion, 1961

excerpts:

"The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others - who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which... is something people with courage can do without... To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent... Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home."

re-spect in literal translation means to look back at, implying that, to have self-respect, is to have the ability to look back at oneself and self worth.

palo verde tree flowers + aloes

SITE Sunnylands Center and Gardens, Palm Springs 

resonant over three hundred sixty eight miles and one hundred twenty nine months of movements proceeding always the same suns setting on a steady horizon never really still, in spirit, still

desert in spring

EXCERPT from The Last Word by Jack Kerouac, 1959

"And all things vanished, what made of without being made into anything really, all things I then saw as unsubstantial trickery of the mind, furthermore it was already long gone out of sight, the liquid waterball earth a speck in sizeless spaces..."

notes: liminal drama in light and dark contrasts, fleeting floats of color in temporary bloom, evidence of time and sun - its beauty and burn, the backdrop of a far reaching horizon, and crunchy paths from here to there.

Idealist

ESSAY Life Styles in the Golden Land: Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-I.) by Joan Didion, 1967

p. 63

"He is in all ways an idealist. As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History."

hwy 17

HIGHWAY 17

"The purgatory of the road preserves the paradise at its end."
- Mercury News

- never enough peanuts -

EXCERPT Sweet Thursday (Steinbeck, 1954)

p.20

"Change comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass. Change may be announced by a small ache, so that you think you're catching cold. Or you may feel a faint disgust for something you loved yesterday. It may even take the form of hunger that peanuts will not satisfy. Isn't overeating said to be one of the strongest symptoms of discontent? And isn't discontent the lever of change?"

active echo

At this moment there is pressure to become actively invisible, an echo. A dead and angry repeat of sound. Is it possible that absence is then necessary to create space for articulation, to withdraw for a moment from the cheering crowd and to listen closely for the faint sound of hearts, beating.

fog

because I am a ________ does not mean I have authority

authority is made up of minuscule fog droplets
in temporary formation

"in all but thunder clouds, the droplets make up less than a millionth of the volume"

meaningful boundaries

ARTICLE Field Guide to Fences via Next City

a typology of fences phrased in the problem-solution framework - though, it'd be nice to see the other side of it (ha-ha!?) and include the merits of those awful fences from the perspective of people who want and love them - we'd have an argument to work with - and go on to construct some meaningful boundaries - walls - fences - screens - posts - doors - gates - or naught.

----------------------------------    ------------------------    -------------------------------------------------------

LA - Literally Glows

INTERVIEW Mike Davis in Conversation with Jennifer Wolch and Dana Cuff via Boom California

Davis: "Gee, you shouldn’t be disheartened by my books on LA. They’re just impassioned polemics on the necessity of the urban left. And my third LA book, Magical Urbanism, literally glows with optimism about the grassroots renaissance going on in our immigrant neighborhoods."

Questions on  -

negotiating developer and public agendas by tactic of design 
(in reference to Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall)

a free spirit in the space of the city
(in reference to the city's capacity to support safely roaming children)

toolkits as alternative to master plans
(in reference to the agency of disciplines)

elite fear of common people
(in reference to the revitalization of downtowns)