Archive

Theme: "Yellow Mercury 4," off Empathy Moves the Water by the Crooked Jades

(Hello again, again.)

Dancers at Akasaka Space Capsule Disco, 2

(Hello again.)

futurist tango

They didn’t know what to call jazz when they brought it to Russia. Parnakh came back from Paris in 1922 with the instruments and some scores in his luggage and the memory of the feel of the music in his head; he introduced it to St. Petersburg as the Russian neologism “orchestra-rumpus.” His circle of avant-garde friends and enemies fell hard for it, as they did for Dada, aviation, sheets of pure color, the tango, helices and stupas, and abstract pictures of satellites hung in the corners of rooms like the ikons of saints. They knew that the only way to be truly modern was to be ancient at the same time, to go back to fantasies of origin so they could get a feel for living and working at the bright dawn of the noon to come. To be at the beginning of something. They lived Wittgenstein’s challenge: “You must say the new and yet, as clearly, the old” – both at once. And they were not alone – as H.D. saw through Sappho’s eyes and wrote as if creating her own fragmentary manuscripts to be recovered centuries hence.

(Introducing a new recurring segment, “every yes” – ideas, sketches, and materials for things I’ll never get around to writing, and should stop thinking about, and which I hope somebody else takes up. We have to say no so many times to say every yes.)

opposition and sister squares are reconciled

Two people, an afternoon, a room, and a machine: Norbert Wiener and Gonzalo Torres y Quevedo, early January 1951, a room in the Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique, 29 rue d’Ulm in Paris, and the machine El Ajedrecista – the first real chess-playing automaton, without a concealed human opponent. Wiener is wearing very much the same iconic uniform in which he appears on the cover of – the black-framed glasses above the white goatee, the abstracted look, the rumpled wool suit. His hands rest on the frame of the machine. (He had already been in Paris for several months, playing chess at the Bar Select and being chaperoned around town by the young Benoît Mandelbrot.) Standing across from him, his hand hovering above the black king, stands Gonzalez Torres y Quevedo, son of Leonardo, who built the first version of El Ajedrecista (and an airship, and a calculator called the “Endless Spindle,” and who likewise made a splash in Paris, in 1914). Between them is the board, and above the board a speaker which will play a phonograph recording announcing check and (with a warning light illuminated) mate. The machine plays the white king and rook, using an electromagnet to move the pieces into position. Given the constraints of the endgame, white will probably win in less than fifty moves against any defense. (A good player could postpone mate for a maximum of 61 moves, which technically allows they to claim a draw.) Losing is inevitable.

(If you’re American and angry about the amazingly terrible tax plan and state of politics, may I recommend making a donation, however small, to some local progressive campaigns? A few bucks at that scale makes a big difference:

Marge Doyle is a terrific candidate for Congress in California’s 8th – the high desert, Inland Empire, and eastern Sierras. Put Marge in charge:

(Happy birthday Amy!)

corner of prince and wooster

They started with a space, at the corner of Prince and Wooster in SoHo in New York City, and an idea: the restaurant would be run and staffed by artists, with the wages pegged not to the business but the lives of the artists working there. It was 1971, moving into the lean years, when rent was vanishingly cheap and arson was epidemic as landlords torched buildings for the insurance money. The city was depopulating – New York’s population declined by almost a million people between 1970 and 1980 – and decaying: Luc Sante recalled living in buildings whose heating and maintenance had been more or less abandoned through the winter, wearing every layer indoors and watching strong winds suck the panes of glass out of the rotten window frames. Downtown, the artists moved into the old iron buildings on Spring, Wooster, and Greene as though overwintering in ice-bound ships, in their drafty riveted bones. George Maciunas renovated the live-work Fluxhouse cooperative buildings to sell at cost for a kibbutz of weirdos and prophets; Marian Zazeela and LaMonte Young and their collaborators in the Theater of Eternal Music arranged environments in which they could play a single song for years in deep violet light; Laurie Anderson mounted discarded Christmas trees upside-down on her ceiling to live inside a forest as she built . With nothing to lose, everything could become an experiment.

(Glad to be with you again! Back from the road for the fall. (Recent offices: 1, 2, , , , .) Cranes, golden plovers, red-throated divers, parrot crossbills, willow tits, yellowhammers, eagle owls, and the bright wings of ospreys; cottongrass, cloudberries, cranberries, sundews and enormous ferns, spruce and birch and anoxic peat mires with pools of still, crimson water; pegmatites, smoky quartz, dolostone, fossil archipelagos, and the perfect vortices left by each oar-stroke across the silent lake.)

(Hello again, just before midsummer. This is the 33rd of these letters, and will be the last until fall. Parts of these letters so far have been notes and sketches towards a book, which now has a deadline on the first of September, and many miles and pages to cover between now and then.

In the meantime, a special summer edition about the pleasure of doing and being, inspiration for long twilit evenings, and three songs for southern winters and northern noons.

There are so many more things I can’t wait to tell you. Until next time.)

(My friend Amy – one of the smartest, most creative people I’ve ever met – has started a newsletter! Already it’s amazing: Ridiculous Ideas to Stave Off Death.)

the oblique function

(Ponderosas, lodgepole pines, sugar pines, incense cedars, manzanita and bitter cherry and rabbitbush. Steller’s jays and dark-eyed juncos and mountain chickadees and kestrels. In the morning it snowed, and then misted as the temperature edged above freezing, and a hard wind blew out of the west. Every tree was frosted glittering white on only its west-facing side: each green needle gloved in white ice. In the afternoon, the sky was wide-open clear and the sun hot on your skin, and in the stony forest there was a sound like a rushing stream, like the clicking, chiming rustle of a room full of typewriters, like a gamelan orchestra: millions of sheaths of ice melting and sliding off and falling and bringing others down with them. Under the boughs of the trees the air was filled with a curtain of glittering, clattering hail; in the open it was gin-clear, hot, and dry.

In the desert the unusual rains brought out blooms: desert willow, indigo bush (like an optical trick, ghost-white behind a cloud of searing violet blossoms), brittlebush, monkey flower, lupine – and with them enormous caterpillars. The dust of the arroyos was covered criss-cross with tracks that look like the tires of road bikes left by the hustling hornworms, so many in some places that you have to take every step carefully to keep from crushing a few. It’s hard to imagine the clouds of massive, striped-wing sphinx moths they’ll be later this year. They nestle on stems, long as your middle finger and fat as carrots, gleaming and colorful in the sun like freshly waxed cars. The arroyos and wash canyons, the badlands and walls of sand and ancient mud feel for a few hours like the ocean floor they once were: tall swaying red-tipped ocotillo, carpets of color, bright invertebrates, stony ridges and canyons, deep blue overhead.

Some recent offices: , , , . Always a pleasure to be with you again.)

(Been on the road, working. Missed you! Recent offices: 1, 2, , , , .)

(Hello my darlings. It’s hard to write about anything else, isn’t it?

There are almost-finished drafts for you about a constructed language for naming stars, about Lina Bo Bardi, about the Triadex Muse, Fantômas, Su Tissue, Carl Schuster, John Cage’s recipes … but thinking about anything other than current events is a challenge right now as it has been for months.

This is deliberate: the Republican president’s ghostwriters have transcribed his techniques, such as they are; they make for interesting reading. They boil down to pushing so aggressively – demanding so much at the top – that you put your counterparty into a kind of shock. The goal is not good-faith negotiation, because a transparent huckster with no willpower or impulse control and a long record of losing other people’s money is not in a position to negotiate in good faith and hammer out a mutually beneficial contract. The goal is to overwhelm, bully, and intimidate the counterparty into agreeing to a deal that is not in their best interest. The way you do this is by making unreasonable demands seem normal, compressing the schedule to prevent time to think, wrong-footing them with sudden shifts in focus and confusing language, making them doubt the reality of their situation, and comical “alpha male” personal-brand posturing, like crushing “pump” handshakes, looming and violating personal space, power ties, and staring contests. The end result, he hopes, is a short-circuited negotiation with a cowed and confused counterparty who has forgotten that this is not a real, reasonable way to do business, and who will make the wrong choice under duress – to settle quickly, just to get it over with.

(Happy new year, my dears.)

surface tension

Let’s start in London in 1968, with a kidnapping, and end in the high desert outside Twentynine Palms. Two kidnappings, actually, but the first was just a mannequin of Michael Caine taken from a massive psychedelic-mod Swinging London party held in a wax museum. The second was a willowy bowl-cut rock-and-roller abducted by four young women to help them solve “the problem of leisure,” spirited away from under the watchful eye of two rival pro wrestlers. These two abductions are the scenario of the only movie directed by Robert Freeman (best known as the preferred photographer of the Beatles).

(»Mir fällt zu Trump nichts ein.«)

the torch

Every night, Karl Kraus sat down at his desk to face “the wall of fire”: burning cities, burning books, the tinder-dry bush in flames out of which God spoke to Moses, the crackling babble of a city full of voices. He sweated, his glasses shining, in conference with the fire as he wrote. Kraus was a writer, perhaps as much as it is possible for a person to be. The heir to a paper mill business (of all things), he did not need a wage: “my business is to pin down the Age between quotation marks.” At 25, he started a magazine with bright red cover, an instant hit. With the first issue, released on April Fool’s Day in 1899, “Vienna turned red,” as though blushing, with a copy of the “red notebook” in so many hands. Kraus was the sole editor for the first decade, writing most of every issue, three issues a month, twelve months a year; after that, he wrote every word of it himself (with a few exceptions). It ran for 922 issues, over almost forty years. It was called : Elias Canetti compared that wall of red-bound volumes to a monumental construction like the Great Wall of China, so vast we can’t know all that it encloses.

(In the spirit of the season.)

ghost story

Robert Aickman wrote some of my favorite … what to call them? They’re not ghost stories, necessarily. He called them his “strange stories.” He wrote 48 of them over about three decades, from the 1950s to the early ’80s. What I like about them is how unsettling and haunting they are – because they’re so calm and level-headed. The classic Aickman story is a character study of someone coming to terms with their choices in life (in relationships, in work, in what they’ve done or failed to do) at some in-between location in the suburbs, or a foreign city where they don’t speak the language, or a holiday destination in the rainy off-season. Aickman, like his characters, is bitterly precise and unsentimental about the melancholy details of down-at-heel everyday life, middle age, and mixed feelings; everything takes place in the same steady, even light. Then the horror begins.

(Seems like the time for this Marge Piercy poem.)

the low road

“The Low Road” Marge Piercy (1980)

(If you’re in a dark place in the northern hemisphere the next two weeks or so and you wake up a few hours before dawn you’ll be able to see the zodiacal light – the “false dawn,” sometimes mistaken for the glow of phantom cities.)

infinitely patient

(Hello again! Some recent offices: 1, 2, , , , . Here are at about 48 degrees and 52 minutes south latitude, looking out towards the .)

(All the flowering trees are blooming in New York City: callery pear trees, crabapple trees, eastern redbuds, hawthorns, magnolias, and the knockout kanzan cherry trees, which are so supersaturated and languid a pink that – with the green and dark branches and cement walls – they bring to mind that moment when Marcel helps Albertine take off her coat and, well: “Indeed, overlapping with her grey crepe-de-chine skirt, her grey cheviot jacket made you suppose that Albertine was all in grey. But signaling to me to help her, because her bouffant sleeves needed smoothing down or pulling down for her to get into or out of her jacket, she took the latter off, and since her sleeves were of very soft tartan, pink, pale blue, greeny, dove-colored, it was as if a rainbow has formed in the grey sky.” This Friday will be April’s full moon, called the “pink moon.”)

The Moscow Refrigeration Institute

(Short and sweet.)

He, She, Us, It!

Alfred Kubin’s is a deeply unsettling novel from 1909 about a city, Pearl, constructed in isolation somewhere in Central Asia by Claus Patera, the richest man in the world. Patera wishes to bring time to a standstill: in a remote location, behind walls and fortifications, he has had Pearl made entirely from elements of other cities – everything ancient, decrepit, and out of time (in both senses). A city of old buildings, old silverware, old clothes, obsolete money, justly forgotten books; new imports are forbidden. In this zone of stilled time, the sky is permanently overcast, the streets filled with a sullen grey-green light. The stasis of history gives actions and gestures a meaninglessness that implies their control by some other, alien force. (It’s a city of the dead that just hasn’t stopped moving yet.) As a novel of the fantastic – more or less the story of building a house to be haunted, laying out the pre-made ruins to summon the catastrophe that produced them – it’s claustrophobic, upsetting, bizarre (Kafka was an admirer); it’s also a guided walking tour of the experience of deep depression, rendered on a metropolitan scale, numb and jittery. Kubin’s gives a pretty good summary of the spirit of the thing.

(Tomorrow is utopian dreamer Charles Fourier’s birthday! Who claimed, in later life, that at the age of nine he swore an oath to destroy trade and commerce, as Hannibal had sworn to destroy Rome. And to replace it with an exquisitely – even obsessively – organized society in which all work and exchange was the product of the desire to do, in itself. Calvino said Fourier was the “alliance of Eros with cybernetics,” which seems about right. Tony Vidler was shown the unpublished Fourier papers in the Bibliothèque nationale, and found a page on which Fourier had listed which houseplants you should put in your windows in the huge cooperative villas of future Harmony, 365 days a year, with the appropriate plant for each day.

All the while, Fourier worked as a clerk and tradesman, holding behind his scowl an inner life of impossible lushness – Douanier Rousseau jungles, packed arcades and courtyards in which every human passion happened to meet a social need, quinces and quaggas and menus and chores, with the universe arranged like a vase of flowers.)

(This Tuesday, Jupiter will be exactly opposite the sun and visible all night.)

Solar’s game

Xul Solar lived more or less permanently in the future. “I am the world champion of a game that no one knows about as yet,” he wrote in 1950. “I am the creator of a technique, of musical scoring, which would allow the piano to be studied in a third of the time that it takes at present. I am the director of a theater that is not yet functioning. I am the creator of a universal language, based on numbers and astrological signs, that will help peoples to know each other better.” Borges, who was his close friend in Buenos Aires, wrote of him: “Xul lived by re-forming and re-creating everything. … He had also invented a kind of complex duodecimal chess which took place on a board boasting one hundred and forty-four squares. Every time he explained it to me he would decide it was too elementary, and would proceed to enrich it with new ramifications, with the result that I never learned it.”

(Tomorrow is a leap day!)

Found in Saragossa

The robots and the book turned up in the hands of French officers after the city of Saragossa (or Zaragoza) fell in 1809. The robots were the three automata created by the master machinists and clockmakers of the Jaquet-Droz family (they’re still in that line of work today, if you have twenty grand to drop on a wristwatch): the Draftsman, the Writer, and the Musician. The Musician is the most haunting of the three, for me, with a far-away expression as she plays, a suggestion of enigmatic interior life – less like the though, than like a room whose door is never unlocked. The Writer is the most mechanically marvelous, with a series of cams corresponding to letters to calligraphically produce any sentence programmed into it. They were on tour more or less continuously after 1789, turning up as exhibits in all kinds of spectacles and stranded in Saragossa by the time of the Peninsular War, as French batteries bombarded the walls and sickness broke out. Officers took them back to Paris; they didn’t return to Neuchâtel until 1905, at which point the writer’s program got a new sentence: “We shall never leave our country again” (which he still writes, once wound-up, in the flowing, twining style of an 18th century correspondent).

(Back in New York at last, just in time for one of the biggest snowstorms in the city’s history. The Hudson’s slate-gray water vanishes into a whiteout horizon. Been on the road: 1, 2, , , . Happy new year, my dears!)

(Here’s a way to donate to Planned Parenthood.)

Llano del Rio

(Bells ringing, bats out hunting, massive cumulus clouds gunmetal gray against the deep blue evening sky heading north over the Hudson. If you’re in New York this coming week the amazing Lubomyr Melnyk will be performing live at Le Poisson Rouge on Friday – not to be missed!)

PURE ENERGY LATENT OR RADIANT

(105 days later, a little more than a quarter of a year. 1, 2, , , .

(In California, around thirty eight degrees five minutes north latitude. Eucalyptus, madrone, coastal oak, fog, kelp beds in the blue Pacific, the red of radiolarian chert. Resinous smells of chaparral, monkey flower, sage. Some recent offices: 1, 2, , .)

(Some recent offices: 1, 2, , .)

(Yesterday’s office. Making a fire is all about leaving space, letting it breathe. In Walter Benjamin’s diary he thinks about writing novels and telling stories as akin to making a good fire: the plot should be as loosely arranged as the logs, and as ready to be consumed, keeping the reader warm and fascinated over a long evening. Writing: finding the intervals, the pace, the right shape that can draw air and burn bright.

When the fire is going in its small circle of stones, night has come on: I watch the wood lick with bright flames, letting out decades of accumulated sunlight in one searing flourish. Overhead, the stars recede to the limits of visibility, a mosaic of light from different times: Aldebaran light from 65 years ago, Deneb light more than two thousand years old, everything intersecting in what Emily Dickinson called “still now.”)

(A passage in one of Schumann’s piano sonatas is marked “As fast as possible,” and is followed a few bars later by another admonition, “Faster,” and then, “Faster still.” Yes!)

Saint Tree-Eater

(Fogs in the morning, Mercury and Venus in the sky, music in the streets. Late spring slowly turning into summer.)

Chambers in the Fun Palace

Cedric Price is one of my favorite people. (He died twelve years ago this summer, but if anyone deserves to be remembered in the present tense, it’s him.) A spiritual and sometimes practical comrade of the Price’s architecture celebrated the unforeseen, anticipating others who’d turn what he made to new purposes. He wanted buildings with “potential for indeterminate change,” buildings that were about events in time rather than objects in space; he wanted, above all, to be surprised – to never have the last word.

(Tonight, as the sun sets, you can see the young and waxing moon low by the horizon to the west, with Mars slightly to the north and Venus high in the sky, near Aldebaran. All the crabapple and cherry trees in New York are starting to blossom.)

Dancers at Akasaka Space Capsule Disco

For a long time I planned to write a book about the people who danced at a particular disco in Akasaka, Tokyo – the Space Capsule Disco – in August in 1969. A future formed there, if only for a few nights; we can see it today the way we see the light from a long-dead star that once illuminated a different planet.

(Highlight of the week: sitting in the Rockford Fosgate SoundLab pressure chamber – which has built-in panic buttons! – at the NY Auto Show: you can feel the air in your throat vibrating as the bass slams all the organs in your chest cavity up against your ribs. Recommended!)

peradam

(On Saturday night, Venus will be in the Pleiades. It’ll be gorgeous.)

something not known to anyone at all

(In Philadelphia! The beautiful trees on the Swarthmore campus, from a splendid tuliptree to a young red oak, as trim and neat and lively as a whippet. Drinking at a bar two floors below Madame Blavatsky’s old apartment (in the window of which was a giant furry hat). In the air: eastern phoebes and redstarts, wrens, thrushes, warblers. At the gorgeously strange Wagner Free Institute of Science: ghost crabs and blood arks, satin spar and wollastonite, cacique nests, Iceland spar and amazonstone, stibnite, and the paper nautilus, the shells of argonauts, about whom Marianne Moore wrote a wonderful poem. The : the shadows cast by Brancusi’s ; Shaker furniture (chairs to be occupied by angels) and ; the secret world of ; and beautiful ceramics – a with a “hare’s fur” glaze, from late Song dynasty, that lives where it is put like an infinitely patient creature.)

Jupiter was very close to the waxing moon at nightfall this evening – Jupiter, the garden of storms.

Rosemary and Liszt

(Wilhelm Reich was born today, he of the blue-green “orgone” energy, the Sex-Pol project in Vienna (“psychoanalytic counseling, Marxist advice and contraceptives”), battling UFOs in the Arizona desert … When visiting Orgonon, Reich’s extraordinary Frank Lloyd Wright-meets-Bond villain fortress/lab, my friend and I found that folks there still credited Reich’s weather-controlling “cloudbusters” for splendid blueberry harvests.)

the invention of clickbait in Girard, Kansas in 1922

When Richard Byrd went to the Antarctic (the first time), he brought about 1,500 books printed on a cylinder press in Girard, Kansas: pretty much the complete catalogue of titles then available from Haldeman-Julius Publications, better known as the “Little Blue Books.” They were likely the best possible balance of weight, size, information density and entertainment value available at the time: three and a half inches by five, very light (the longest were only sixty pages), and printed on the cheapest paper stock available, they encompassed a breadth of material difficult to convey except through a . and on and on and on (and this was only one of several Haldeman-Julius publishing imprints).

Tonight’s the new moon, tomorrow’s the equinox.

the inflation saints, 1: Gusto Gräser

Try to picture him, Gusto, “precursor and stimulator of all the Inflation saints,” on the roads of pre-First World War Europe, in a cut-out tunic and rope sandals and a poncho of his own design, sleeping in roadside chapels and saints’ niches and caves, eating windfall fruit and begging bread and seeking a way of life based on demandlessness, needlessness, modesty of life, to live without taking. In 1907, he turns up in Berlin, where he recites poetry and dances his model of history. It falls into three periods: “Uru,” before we made fire and became slaves to technology; “Zwing,” most of history – schools, armies, compulsion; and the future, when grass grows over the cities and the dance is restored.

It’s a cloudy, slate-colored Sunday morning in New York City. (As the snow melts, it’s like a long-exposure photograph of the detritus and trash of weeks of foot traffic being developed: stacked days of smoking and walking dogs as one continuous surface.) Today is the Ides of March, and the birthday of my beloved anarchist geographer and proto-bioregionalist Élisée Reclus. He came up with one of my favorite slogans, during the Paris Commune – “Work to Make Ourselves Useless”! – and was a great scientific bard of the genesis of rivers. In the 1890s, he proposed the construction of a 1:100,000-scale globe, more than 400 feet tall and hand-painted and modeled with new geographical data as it came in – a satellite view (“as if you were sailing above it in a balloon”), a whole Earth. Patrick Geddes loved the idea: “the image, the shrine, and temple of the Earth-mother.”