Summer Hotel Retreat Day 11

Kevin got in late last night, we slept until 11, I wrote for a bit, Kevin answered email, we got dressed and were out all day and evening playing with the locals.  It's late again and I'm tired, so I'll end the Summer Hotel Retreat series with a photo log.

We began our day on Venice Blvd. in Culver City, lunching with Hedi El Kholti at Cafe Brazil.  Hedi's a wonderful story teller and I was moved by his love of reality TV, how his enjoyment goes beyond simple irony to heartfelt identification with the artificially constructed realities of the participants.  A reminder that you don't have to believe art in order to be moved by it.  I adore Hedi's willingness to invest in the cheesy.

After lunch we drove over to La Cienega and stopped in at a few art galleries.  Here's Hedi walking behind Jason Sherry orbs comprised of eyeglasses at Luis De Jesus gallery.

Since our next stop was Chinatown, which is on the way to Hedi's home, he led us there in his car.  It was so much fun, following his Subaru, letting go of my agency, and cruising through backroads of LA that Mapquest would never suggest.  Once in Chinatown, we ate more food with Vanessa Place and Christine Wertheim at Via Cafe.  Vanessa instilled within me a great desire to hear Dolly Parton's cover of "Stairway to Heaven."

Vanessa Place, Christine Wertheim, Kevin Killian

Then we walked over to Poetic Research Bureau to hear Julia Bloch and Frank Montesonti.  Here's PRB principal Joseph Mosconi proudly standing beside the placard in the plaza outside the venue.

Here's Frank Montesonti at a particularly dramatic moment of his text.  Frank went to Indiana University, as did I, where he met Andrew Kenower before Andrew moved to the Bay Area.  Small world.  Frank presented two bodies of work.  The first was comprised of well-crafted poems that he jokingly derided as "journal gems."  The second manuscript, of newer work, was more experimental, looser, shaggier, much more out there.  But he seems equally comfortable in both modes.  It was a satisfying range of tone.

Julia read from her new book Letters to Kelly Clarkson, whom you'll remember was the first winner of American Idol.  Julia began the collection 10 years ago in my private workshop.  Kevin and I sat in the front row like proud hens as she gave a stunning reading.  She ended with newer work, one poem inspired by Terry Castle's talk at the Q.E.D. panel I was on that launched the Summer Hotel Retreat series, so Julia brought my Southern California experience round full circle.  I loved the Terry Castle poem.

Here's Diane Ward and Aaron Kunin standing in the courtyard after the reading.  I dreamed about Aaron last night, so Kevin said I brought him to the reading.  I've known both Diane and Aaron for many years, and it was a treat to get to spend time with them this evening.

The readers and most of the audience ended up at Hop Louie, a nearby bar.  Here's Kevin, Diane, Julia, and Allison Harris horsing around outside.

And now, as I click away at the keyboard, Kevin's lying fully clothed on top of the kingsize bed doing heavy sleep breathing.  I'm exhausted and can't wait to climb on there with him.  Tomorrow night I'll be back in San Francisco, with my three cats, each in their own special way guilt-tripping me for being gone so long.  Thank you all, whoever you are, for sharing my Summer Hotel Retreat with me.  I couldn't have done it without you.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 10

As I type this, Kevin is on a plane heading this way, a plane that took off three and a half hours late.  Poor Kevin.  I had plans for the evening that fell through last minute, too late to set something up with somebody else, especially with my being on the west side on Friday, the traffic out of here is monstrous.  So I decided to go to Santa Monica, simply because it's not here, and it's easy to get to.  I started with a Taoist yoga class.  It was at a laid back neighborhoody studio, a mile or so away from the water and all the shopping. Here's the back door to the studio.  This was a beginning class.  It was packed, mostly with regulars.  Lots of slow movements that strengthen your core and limber your joints.  A heavy emphasis on openness and relaxation.  I enjoyed the balancing poses, and I normally hate balancing poses.  The teacher said that balance wasn't static, so we'd be balanced on one leg and then we were supposed to sway in all directions, bend forward and backwards, exploring the limits of our balance, and experiencing the shifting nature of balance.  Usually in balancing poses people are wobbling and gritting their teeth, but this was fluid and fun.  Even though I felt good afterwards I didn't feel totally transformed like I tend to after a Hatha class.  But I'd go back again because I liked the energy of the place

Then I headed over to downtown Santa Monica and used up the remaining funds on my $75 gift certificate to Real Foods Daily.  I like hippie vegetarian food, and that's one thing that's almost impossible to get in San Francisco.  I ate beans and quinoa and greens and vegan caesar salad.  And then I took a walk, and of course I took another photo of one of the dinosaur topiary fountains.

It looks like the dinosaur's spitting light, but it's water.  It's surprising how indifferent the people in the photo seem to the dinosaur.  I think we all should be bowing down to it.  I saw one young blonde woman posing in front of it, and she stuck her tongue all the way out, so it looked fat and wide and hung down towards her chin.  It was a very unflattering look.  Clearly, the dinosaur held some strange bestial power over her.  She maintained this pose for a really long time as a friend slowly took her picture.

Every few feet there were singers with guitars and other street performers.  Here's a blurry photo of a guy who was doing a combo of break dancing and acrobatics.  He was part of a troupe.  They were very professional and really worked the audience.  When they passed around a neon green bucket, I felt enchanted and dropped in a $5 bill.

And then, as my hippie food digested, I went to Santa Monica's art theater and saw Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding, starring Jane Fonda as a hippie grandmother who wins over the affections of her uptight lawyer daughter who she hasn't seen in 20 years, as well as her teenage granddaugher and grandson.  The movie was filled with accomplished actors—it had enough star power to light a small city, but it was dreck.  No development, the kind of movie where characters will say two lines to one another, and then we're supposed to care about them and their relationship.  In 80 minutes, the movie developed 3 new love relationships, each of which was given like 5 minutes of tension when everything was falling apart at the end of Act II.  The movie also developed, not one, but two alienated mother/daughter relationships that moved, predictably, towards understanding.  Jane's character lives in Woodstock, which has been frozen in time, having never left the 60s, and everybody who comes there, regardless of age, starts smoking grass, going to protest marches, dancing at music festivals, and howling at the full moon.  I think they should have made it a horror film, about the sinister effect this town has on all who enter it, with Jane the head sorceress of a horde of tie-dyed zombies.  That would have been fun to watch.  Jane Fonda professionally emoted like crazy, but had no chemistry with anybody.  It was like she was acting up a storm to a blank space into which the other characters were later digitally inserted.  Here's a series of pix I took on my iphone of Jane emoting.

Kevin will be here in half an hour or so, and aloneness will be no more.  I'll still be as weird as ever, but he'll be here to soften the edge.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 9

Here's a palm tree at the Howard Hughes Center, to give this blog that Southern California feel.  Of course they have palm trees in San Francisco, but they don't look this festive.  Spent the evening in the sushi place at the Howard Hughes Center, eating veggie sushi, drinking beaujolais, and reading student work.  I don't usually drink wine while reading student work, but sometimes the occasion just calls for it.  There were so many other fun things I could have done this evening, so many wonderful people here I want to see but won't have time for, but I was drooling with social exhaustion, plus my whole evening was geared towards my being able to sleep in tomorrow morning, which won't be that late because I have to get up in time to do my writing project before I head out.  I wore my new black sweater to the sushi place.  I avoid Nordstrom Rack as most things I've bought there instantly end up in the Goodwill bag, but this sweater is a find.  Here I am, via the wonders of my MacBook Air's Photobooth program, wearing my black sweater.  Note the abstract hotel art on the wall behind me, and the glamorous golden drapes.

I look mean in the photo, like I'm a serious writer.  This blog for me is the equivalent of an artist's sketchbook.  It's all about quickly putting things together in a way that appeals to me.  Often I could care less about the content, it's all about the quick formal coalescence.  Some people who have commented on the blog have gotten that.  I gave a seminar today and one of the students came up to me and said she was enjoying my Hotel Retreat.  I told her not to tell any of the other students about it.  I've never figured out how to teach and be fully human.  I sometimes feel like a figure, a functionary, not a person.

I almost went this evening to see Snow White and the Huntsman.  It sounded so luxurious to get lost in something large and colorful and loud.  In San Francisco I tried to get Kevin to go see it, and he was willing but he said he heard it was awful, so I gave up, and then we got busy and ended up not going to see any movie.  I rarely go to the movies alone.  The last one was Bridesmaids, in Fort Bragg, where I'll be going at the end of the month with Bett Williams.  I looked at the trailers to Snow White and the Huntsman, and just from that it was clear that a major problem with the movie is that Charlize Theron is gorgeous and fabu up the wazoo, and Kristen Stewart is like this tense little rodent.  No way would I ever buy KS as being more fair than CT.  Disney got it right, making Snow White cuter than the evil queen.  And what's up with Snow White wearing armor and going into battle????  What about the miraculous power of female passivity?  And a sexuality so powerful that when aroused it awakens you from the dead?  Flailing around on a battlefield isn't repressed enough; Kevin's right, it's awful.

This is the end of this round of aloneness.  Temporary aloneness is such a joy, knowing that tomorrow night Kevin will swoop in, in a huge metal bird and relieve it.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 8

In my head today, reading about narrative time, and not finding it as interesting as I'd hoped and also thinking about with the popularity of "new technologies" there needs to be new theories of narrative time, ones which address the subversion of closure of say blog-based narratives, and I'm sure there are plenty of such theories already and I'm showing my ignorance here.  It struck me how even something as straightforward as the buddhist works against conventional notions of narrative time in that the narrator does not know the ending ahead of time.  The ending was not a planned ending but revealed as the narrator-writer went through the process of living/writing the material.  It was not a neatly plotted looking back, and events do not follow one another with a sense of causal inevitability.

I'm very much in my head today.  As I mentioned at the beginning of the Summer Hotel Retreat, I'm working on another writing project.  I do that first thing in the morning, so my days are framed by writing, and that's basically all I want to do.  The outside world doesn't feel very real (except as a palette for details) when you're in writing mode.  Hi, you're a person, I will engage with you because that's what people do with one another, and I am programmed to do that.  But I come alive when alone and writing.

The picture is of the black whisper-thin wool pullover I got this evening, on clearance at Nordstrom Rack.  Antioch is so cold, and I couldn't bear another day of shivering.  I don't know why I forgot that and didn't pack something cozy to wear at school.  The sweater has raglan sleeves.  According to Wikipedia, "A raglan sleeve is a type of sleeve whose distinguishing characteristic is to extend in one piece fully to the collar, leaving a diagonal seam from underarm to collarbone."  I include the definition because I'm used to Kevin whose vocabulary for women's clothing is surprisingly paltry.   Those buttons there don't button, they just dot the left distinguishing diagonal seam, and there's a bit of shirring that also comes off of that seam.  For this sweater it's all about that seam.

Been thinking how every time I didn't get what I wanted when I was young, it turned out to be a blessing.  I guess that means that loss and suffering can be a blessing even if they don't make you a better person.  They may simply be about propelling you into other situations.  Don't want to say better situation or to get into anything like destiny here because that would bring us back so some kind of inevitable narrative closure.  Fuck that.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 7

Today was all school school school, and afterwards I went out to a very nice dinner with former students.  This morning I raced to get dressed so I could walk to my office.  I'm like this kid who can't wait to scamper through the streets.  It was overcast and not warm or cool, an oddly temperatureless atmosphere, but the mugginess was such that you'd feel clammy and sweaty no matter what you wore.  When I got to campus a guy in a lime green safety vest was mowing the lawn, and there was that intoxicating suburban grassy scent, which like the scent of freshly cut wood makes my father loom large in my consciousness.  All that I'm doing here is punctuated and framed by my reading of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, which Meredith Quartermain suggested after she read the buddhist.  And it's the perfect book for me right now, the waves and waves of charismatic prophets.  This book is proving to me beyond a doubt that my suspicious that human rationality is a total myth have been correct all along.  I'm very interested in charismatic poets as well as religious figures.  My studies of cults have revamped my understanding of poetry communities.  Since I started with grass, I went to Google images and typed in "green."  I chose the frogs because they seem so adoring of one another.  Two beings on a leaf—is that enough to constitute a community?  My father is the only person I've ever heard call French people "frogs."

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 6

I didn't take any pictures today, didn't talk with anybody not connected to Antioch, except for Kevin on the phone.  Kevin's doing fine, very busy with many laughter-invoking stories to tell.

I went to a dinner in downtown Culver City this evening at the chair's house, for faculty and graduating students.  Catered in his backyard, with great food and wine, it was fun.  You access Steve's house by "passing through a walkway between two pairs of small salmon-colored Spanish court-style apartments (one of which was allegedly occupied by Marilyn Monroe in her early studio days)."  Passing MM's door was just the beginning of my Hollywood history tour.  Afterwards as Alistair McCartney and I walked back to the parking garage, he pointed out Culver Studios, where Gone With the Wind was shot.  We stopped and peered through the gates.

Here's a picture of the studio in 1920.  It still looks the same, an ornate white mansion.  We also passed the Culver Hotel, where most of the Munchkins stayed during the filming of Wizard of Oz.  From the hotel website:

The reputed stories of the Munchkins' supposedly drunken shenanigans are legendary, and helped inspire the 1981 movie comedy Under the Rainbow (starring Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher). The producers used the actual hotel as a shooting site for that fictionalized version of the making-of-Oz story.

According to some of the not-so-tall tales, many of the 124 adult midgets got drunk, sang choruses of "Ding Dong, The Bitch Is Dead," and almost wrecked the hotel.

No one so far is trashing my hotel, but you never know from day to day who your floormates are going to be, who's going to propel you into wondering what in the world could be causing that person to pace incessantly, what combination of effects makes other people slam doors repeatedly, as if they want the whole floor to know they're there—the kind of person who is constantly shouting I EXIST.  Here's a photo I took a couple of days ago of the mirror I use to put on make up.  It has suction cups on the back of it, and I stuck it on the window because I've found that facing natural light I can best see what I'm doing.  The room heater and a foot-wide ledge are between me and the mirror, so I have to lean towards it.  I usually put my left hand on the window for balance, and I sometimes wonder what someone in the parking lot below who happens to look up thinks when they see me peering so intently and awkwardly into the window.  Perhaps they think I've taken some bath salts, the evil designer drug I was reading about online, and I'm trying to eat my way through the glass.  Perhaps they think I'm a voyeur staring down at them, or an exhibitionist about to throw off all my clothes.  Or perhaps they just look and don't think anything at all.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 5

Tonight I drove over to Matias Viegener's house in Silver Lake.  Connie Samaras and Jeannie Simms arrived a few minutes after I did.  Jeannie is in town from Boston, where she teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.  The four of us went to a nearby pho house and shouted at one another over noodles and a shared rice crepe.  It was very loud and hip in the pho house and communication was difficult.  But we had fun.  I taught Connie a closed-mouth smile that seems to be popular with many young women on Facebook.  You pooch out your lips in a pout and then you crank up the corners of your mouth.  So we were practicing that and then we all got out our iphones and started shooting pictures of one another.

Here's my favorite of the ones I took:
 

It was decided that the overhead bulb was too harsh, so Jeannie held her hand up to mute the light, and in the bottom left, that's Matias holding up a napkin to bounce fill light off of.  Connie's shots of Jeannie and herself were tightly framed, and sweet.

Afterwards, walking to the car, we all photographed the window of the fetish shop down the street, which had a Houdini/magic act theme.  A woman in a gold latex gown is levitated/held in midair by strings attached to bondage straps around her neck and ankles.  The photo above, taken before dinner in daylight, registers the full effect.  But at night, the lighting added drama and mystery, like we had stepped into a Hammer film, and when we turned our backs the mannequins would come to life, and if not get us, get somebody.  I was burnt from lack of sleep and teaching all day, and it was such a treat to be able to step out of conversational mode and just play, to fart around doing iphone snapshots with real photographers who have shows, and in Connie's case, a forthcoming retrospective.  My mother played with people a lot, and she never stopped doing that.  I see her laughing so hard, she's bent over, gasping and sputtering.

On the way up the hill to Matias' house, one block was loaded with police cars stopped at erratic angles, and in the middle of the block we could see yellow tape cordoning off an area, and our carload decided the yellow tape meant there had been a murder.  And the rest of the three or so blocks to Matias' house, we discussed how when you see ghastly car wrecks or other personal disasters that you're sure have resulted in death, you can google and google and you can never find reference to them, can never find out what happened.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 4

This one's a quickie, as I have to get up at 6 in the morning.  I had a wonderful evening with Christine Wertheim, Sheree Rose, and Anna Gibbs.  Anna's visiting Christine from Australia, and she tells me we met before, in San Francisco years ago, back in the days when Dan Davidson and Kathy Acker were still alive.  I can't remember if Dan and Kathy knew each other, but Anna knew both of them.  We met at the Olympic Day Spa in Koreatown, and soaked and exfoliated for a couple of hours.  Moving back and forth between the steaming mugwort pool and the ice water pool, after the initial shock of it, becomes so exhilarating.  Sitting in my robe on a couch outside the pools, sipping tea and taking in all the naked female bodies, all shapes and ages and races, I found my heart twirling open, embracing all of them.  It was one of those moments that are very quiet, but fucking intense.

Then we drove down Olympic a few blocks to the Beverly Soon Tofu House.  In the photo, from left to right:  Christine, Sheree, Anna.  Great conversation, great food.  Christine ordered barbecued squid, and just this morning on Facebook somebody had posted a link to an ABC News article, "Cooked Squid Inseminates Woman's Mouth."  It was gruesome.  Each time one my tablemates stuck a slice of this like 10-inch long squid in her mouth, I'd feel kind of squirmy, and it took every social grace that's ever been instilled in me not to mention the article as they ate.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 3

Feeling homesick.  Talked with Kevin on the phone this evening for an hour and a half.  Here's a photo of a prop he sent me, for the video/play he's collaborating on with Darrell Alvarez for SFMOMA.  It's a crown of thorns Takming Chung made out of canvas and chalk.  He painted it black, and while it was wet, rolled and shaped the canvas around his head and inserted the chalk and then let it dry on his head for 8 hours.  Artists do amazing things.  Around them, I feel so incompetent with physicality.  The black ball thingy it's perched on is just for display and is not a part of the project.

Kevin said he was a little down as well and that talking to him, I "diverted" him.  And I was like, diverted is a strange word to use, isn't that something you do with traffic, like divert it to another lane.  So then we talked about the various meanings of divert and diversion, and this is why it was so easy to be on the phone for an hour and a half.  When I said to Kevin we lived in a police state, he said that someone could be listening into our conversation right now, and then we discussed whether they would have been amused, and we agreed that it was a fun lively, conversation, and that they probably would have been amused.  Kevin told me his father was at the Battle of the Bulge, something I hadn't heard before.

Here's a little wail:  I want to go home.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 2

Settled into my hotel room, am sipping chamomile tea and nibbling on half a rice cake with Brazillian pepper tree honey produced in Long Beach.  I never heard of a Brazilian pepper tree.  According to the label, "Brazilian peppertree has a rich, vibrant flavor, from the nectar of this familiar tree that blooms throughout California in the late heat of summer."  Coming from San Francisco, I think what late heat of summer?  I wonder if it grows up there.  Probably in Golden Gate Park for Golden Gate Park miraculously contains the plants of all nations and ecosystems.

I looked up the Brazilian pepper tree, and it's the plant pink peppercorns come from, which really aren't peppercorns at all.  The Brazilian pepper tree isn't very popular online for it's considered an invasive species.  From Wikipedia:

In the United States, it has been introduced to California, Texas, Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, Louisiana and Florida. Planted originally as an ornamental outside of its native range, Brazilian pepper has become widespread and is considered an invasive species in many subtropical regions with moderate to high rainfall, including parts or all of Australia, the Bahamas, Bermuda, southern China, Cuba, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, Hawaii, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Mauritius, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Norfolk Island, Puerto Rico, Réunion, South Africa, and the United States. In drier areas, such as Israel and southern California, it is also grown but has not generally proved invasive. In California, it is considered invasive in coastal regions by the California Invasive Plant Council.

California Invasive Plant Council?  Wow.  For me the Brazilian pepper tree embodies female excess.  In the above photo, the man is looking at her in fear and disdain.  He's thinking to himself this tree is too much, too fucking much.  He finds himself drawn to her anyway, and he hates that.  I'm enjoying the honey from this pushy plant, which is surprisingly spicy and a touch bitter.

At Venice Whole Foods, when I sitting at the outside tables, eating dinner, I saw a very attractive, well put together young woman digging through the trash cans for takeout containers that had food remaining in them.  She gathered a few containers then sat down and ate from them.  In San Francisco, I've seen plenty of people digging for food in garbage cans, but none of them approached this woman's glamor.  I thought of the website I found a month or so ago about which Hollywood stars had been homeless.  There are many such lists online.  Here's one.  It was surprising how many stars once lived in their cars or shelters or slept outside.  I imagined this woman as the next Cameron Diaz, and at first she'd suppress her Whole Foods scavenging, but then she'd embrace it for it gave her street cred.  After I ate I went back into Whole Foods to shop, where I saw a real star, more of a character actor, an aging man with a full head of beautiful white hair who plays older male parts, reassuring us that we can look our age but still be incredibly handsome.  Hopefully I'll recognize him in something while we're watching TV and Kevin can tell me who he is.

Driving back to the hotel I heard a cut from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon on the radio, which made me feel like I'd really arrived.  Every time I'm here they play Dark Side of the Moon on the radio, something I've never heard on any other radio.  But then I never listen to the radio except when I'm here, so maybe all cities are constantly broadcasting Dark Side of the Moon.

Summer Hotel Retreat Day 1

Yes, I'm back in Culver City.  When I got in to LAX, getting bags and rental car took way longer than I would have dreamed.  This was going to make what I'd imagined as a relaxing time before the Q.E.D. panel at the MAK Center into a rushed frenzy, except I was too tired and steeped in the endless monotone of airport time to feel frenzy.  I played on Facebook on my iphone as I waited in the scandalously long line at the rental car place.  I had fun standing in the scandalously long line, turning fucking off into a survival skill.  I stopped at the Trader Joe's near the airport and picked up a few things like water and soy coffee creamer and some organic apricots and blackberries, and these lovely peonies.  What do you put peonies in, in a hotel room?  The full stems I put in the ice bucket, and the blossom that broke, I put in a water glass.  These peonies make me insanely happy.  Small comforts excite in a hotel room.  I brought with me the sprig of mugwort Ariana Reines gave me when we had dinner on Sunday.  Ariana's mugwort also makes me very happy.

Here's a picture of Ariana at Ritual Cafe on Valencia Street, looking wonderfully happy.

I don't know how regularly I'll be chronicling this summer's hotel retreat, as I plan to work on other writing projects while here, but doing this is oddly seductive for me—again, the small things make you happy in a hotel room, so we'll see.

The Authentic Objects panel was great.  Terry Castle was spunky and playful and super smart, projecting an eccentricity of someone who's put up with so much in life and just isn't going to fucking put up with it any longer.  Judie Bamber talked about her series of drawings and paintings based on photos of her mother.  Kevin and I were lucky enough go to a show of them in Culver City the last time I came down here.  Here's a link to some of the images, they're awesome, with an eroticism that really mucks around with conventional notions of the mother-daughter romance.  I loved what Judie had to say about how making the pieces was an enactment of her unfulfilled desire for her mother.  I got the sense that making the art was invoking a love that's never attainable.  Lots of talk on the panel about the unattainability of the loved object.  Vanessa Place was a marvel of spontaneously explicating threads she saw in all our work, and she brought our discussion of objects back to women, women's status as objects.  At dinner afterwards she said she wanted the panel to be all women, to hear women, who are objects, speaking about objects.  The event deserves much more unpacking than my tired brain will allow.  I'll end with a group photo taken outside the sushi place we ate at after the panel.

Terry Castle, Judie Bamber, Teresa Carmody, Vanessa Place, Kimberli Meyer

Q.E.D.

I'll be giving a panel presentation tomorrow night (Wednesday) as part of Les Figues' Q.E.D. series.  The topic of the panel is Authentic Objects.  I made a handout! 

Does an object need a form?
Does an objection?
Does anything speak for itself?

Wednesday | June 13, 2012 | 7:00 p.m.
MAK Center Schindler House 835 N. Kings Road West Hollywood, CA 90069

FEATURING:
Judie Bamber
Dodie Bellamy
Terry Castle

Moderated by Vanessa Place.

$7 General; Free for Friends of the MAK Center and Members of Les Figues Press with RSVP (office[at]makcenter.org).

Q.E.D. is a short series of long conversations on queer art and literature. The series includes three events over the course of three months (April 11, May 9 & June 13, 2012); each evening features a writer, an artist and a critic in a conversation about contemporary issues and conditions of queer art and literature. The series is hosted and moderated by Les Figues Press Co-Director Vanessa Place, and will be recorded and made available online. The program is curated by Les Figues Press and supported through a Cultural Resource Development Grant from the City of West Hollywood.

Q.E.D. takes its name from a novel by Gertrude Stein; Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum, or Things as They Are) was one of the earliest coming stories, written in 1903 though not published until 1950, after Stein’s death.

Quick Return

Back from Portland, where Kevin and I read in the fabulous drag bar, Embers.  Here's a pic of Siren lip-synching to a Kylie Minogue song.  That's Publication Studio's Matthew Stadler approaching the stage to give her a tip.  Siren opened the evening with a song, then I read, then Siren did another Kylie song, then Kevin read, then Siren closed the evening.  She was singing for tips, so audience members would hand her dollar bills or (preferably) stick them in her cleavage.  Of course it was hilarious seeing the poets do this, and adorable when Meredith and Peter Quartermain, who were visiting from Vancouver, did it.  One poet said she never imagined she'd do something like stick a dollar bill in Siren's cleavage, and when she did it she felt surprisingly sexual.  It was a great evening.  Thanks to Donal Mosher and Matthew for arranging it.  We stayed at Matthew's house and hung out with him, went to a couple of dinners, and Kevin took some photographs for his vast Raymond Pettibon genitals project, where he photographs men in various states of dress and undress, holding an ink drawing of a lurid pink lifesize set of cock and balls Raymond did, over their own genitals.

When we got back to SF, we dropped off our luggage and headed over to CCA for an exhibition at the Wattis Institute centering on the letter K.  "An exhibition curated by Kadist Curatorial Resident Juan A. Gaitán, featuring works by Johanna Calle, Liam Everett, Ceal Floyer, Claire Fontaine, Ken Lum, Ciprian Muresan, Pedro Reyes, Chen Shaoxiong, Gabriel Sierra, and Carey Young."  A smart, playful show.  Here's Kevin, aka "KK," paying homage to his letter.

At the reading in Portland, Publication Studio gave me my contributor's copy of their new anthology edited by Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler, Revolution: A Reader.  I have two pieces in the book, both reprinted from my book Academonia.  When Lisa and Matthew asked me if they could include the pieces, nobody could have acted less interested than I.  I sent them a "yeah, whatever," email.  Imagine my surprise when I get the book and it's jaw-dropping awesome.  I can't believe I'm in the same book as this stellar lineup:

Kathy Acker • Etel Adnan • Giorgio Agamben • Arakawa + Gins • Hannah Arendt • Dodie Bellamy • Hakim Bey • David Brazil • Edmund Burke • Thomas Carlyle • Bernal Diaz del Castillo • Mahmoud Darwish • Guy Davenport • Angela Davis • Gilles Deleuze • Stacy Doris • Hal Draper • Frantz Fanon • Shulamith Firestone • M.F.K. Fisher • Michel Foucault • Charles Fourier • Mavis Gallant • Jean Genet • George Grosz • Ian Hamilton Finlay • Alan Halsey • Donna Haraway • Harry Hay • William Hazlitt • Christopher Hill • Langston Hughes • Ivan Illich • The Invisible Committee • Calvin Johnson • J. Krishnamurti • Thomas Kuhn • Violette Leduc • Mina Loy • Lucretius • Asmaa Mahfouz • Agnes Martin • Marshall McLuhan • Louise Michel • Eileen Myles • Elena Poniatowska • Miguel Leòn-Portilla • Michel Ragon • Jacques Rancière • Kristin Ross • Edward Said • Saskia Sassen • Percy Bysshe Shelley • Situationist International • Valerie Solanas • Rebecca Spang • Gertrude Stein • Jalal Toufic • Edward John Trelawney • Flora Tristan • Oscar Tuazon • Vivienne Westwood • Oscar Wilde • Raymond Williams • Mary Wollstonecraft • George Woodcock.

I love the format, where Lisa and Matthew include marginal annotations—annotations isn't the right word for most of them—Lisa and Matthew carry on a conversation in the margins of each piece.  Their witty, quirky, brilliant dialogue alone is worth the cover price.  The book is arranged by lifestages, "from 'beginning,' to 'childhood,' 'education,' 'adulthood,' and 'death.' The hope is to bring the embodied fact of revolution into the lived present by engaging readers with language that takes them there, no matter where they are to begin with."  I believe that if a person were to read this amazing book from cover to cover, it would change their life.