Dappled Cities stole the show...

Seriously, Tokyo Police Club was good... but Dappled Cities were amazing!!!

Fog...

I'm washing dishes
and cleaning a good time.
There's a Mexican stand off
between the night and my kitchen,
sodium is at odds with incandescence
and fog visits every corner unseen
felt like footfalls on the grave.
This is summer by the ocean,
a melodious harmonium,
Shankar's raga bhimpalasi
struggling with the metronomic
call of a horn near the water.
Mythologically speaking
something wails in the glow
of a dark night illuminated within
by handfuls of tears,
floating between the building
detached from the greater body
of being heard.

The New 7 Wonders Of The World

 

The New Wonders	The old Wonders

More fog...

“There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain's tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.”

--Federico Garcia Lorca

Yesteryear's achievment

This is by far the best... I mean sure, Doctors are human, and I'm sure there are some cardiologists that finish a triple bypass and then step outside the hospital and have a cig, or two, but to run an add like this... wow! So the science of big tobacco, disproving that smoking leads to lung cancer, or at least creating reasonable doubt in such a ludicrous theory, was first applied in a statistical manner to determine if doctors, soon to become their worst enemies, preferred their cigarettes to marlboros. I'm glad Camel helped inform of us which smooth turkish blend to trust. Man I want a smoke...

More from yesteryear

Now this one is just about being blunt, and tasteless, and if this were the modern age, where looking like Tucker Carlson was a crime, or should be, then the creator of this add would find themselves with the ACLU crawling single file, up his a$$ with a microscope and a subpoena. It amazes me how much bigotry there was, and still is, but wow, these things didn't pull any punches.

The marketing of yesteryear

Maybe this is bad, well it's probably not good, but I'm thinking that this add is just anticipating the rage that would come to be known as the Atkins diet. I mean look at all the happy shiney people who went around stuffing their faces with bacon and eggs and pork bellies, washing them down with a handful of greens and watching as the miracle of Ketosis slimmed their waste and caused their cholesterol to shoot through the roof! This is the kind of future thinking that probably turned the creator of this add into a multi millionaire who started a company that is still around today, maybe... er um, maybe not...

To teach

Listening to NPR: story about Cardinal Mohoney in LA, snippets of victims voices etc. "I was a cradle catholic, I waited to the 11th hour to file suite against the church that taught me how to love God." I find this strange, that a church teaches you to love God, I thought it was something that existed within everyone, or most, this concept of Love and that the act of Love itself was that of G-d? Does Love have to be focused upon the image of a bearded figure in order to realize the act of it? Or is it in the fact that one can experience love for another being, another thing, the thingness of l-o-v-e that in and of itself is a manifestation of the divine? So the church that taught her how to do it, isn't it only riding the coat tails of a capacity that exists within each person to begin with? Sure direction, focus, right-way-of-life, a sense of noble purpose etc, but really, the core of it all, the love, the basic tenets of J.C., isn't that just common sense? I don't know... maybe, but that phrase struck me as incredibly strange.

For Bert Chen

Faster than a clemens curve or careening off a highway cliff because the night is so much thicker here than humid nights on Jersey shores. Bridge and tunnel bruise and fly: to experience the sensation of trust let go of the rock. Oh this is how we roll: digesting G-d in a bowl of tendon and tripe. Worshiping his knife work, commerce, a labor, let's not get crazy, but I've a lesson to learn in random geometry. Lady luck's a tough old sow that blessed few and cursed tomorrow's suckers. Listen the metro's a dirty place, but you wouldn't ever ride the bus. When the mechanics of a penis on four wheels find expression between the champs d'elysee and boulevard st. michel, it'll be the sound of pigeon wings: this is called the sauce and you get to decide if you're on or off.

More Fog...

“Like a man travelling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on each side, but near him all appears clear, though in truth he is as much in the fog as any of them.”

-Benjamin Franklin

Containment

The fog is a pressure chamber into which you plunge headlong. There's the mystery and the mystery of things left unsaid. The fog is a destination. Outside there's this cool summer day and then there's the fog, a welt on the land, gray, a pustule to be filled with brooding if you so choose. The fog's characteristics are quite plain: to be filled by your mood. The fog is filled now with something somber, something like the book I'm reading. I should stop reading this book as it's depressing me in a strange way, but then I can't quite put it down and want to get through it hoping that by the time I do the sun will have burned a pin sized hole through the fog on the spot where I'm sitting by the window where half my body is cold from exposure and the half that is resting against the leather of my reading chair is warm. I'm feeling a little like mercury racing through the pages of Observatory Mansions, but this flight isn't heraldic, I'm not bringing Zeus any lightning bolts from Vulcan, I'm sitting and have decided to make a cup of tea. I'm no longer sitting in my chair, I've moved, and the tea will help warm me from the inside and ease the scratch in the back of my throat. The scratch is deeper than the soft pink skin of my esophagus and extends into something like my spine. My spine is a conduit that radiates memories to all parts of my body. I'm remembering my time abroad which has already started to become a kind of dream. My body is remembering my time abroad and the scratch and the cough are reminders that death in dreams can be similar to the death of dreams and that each has a toll in the real world. My spine is reminding me that there's a place and time for things and that fog brings them to bear on my consciousness. My spine feels fatigue in the form of weight; when the limbs of my body, the matter of my person, and the fact that weight is a measure of gravity, when the gravity of the fog being filled with memories and things is weighing down on my limbs, and they are tugged from below by the nature of things, this is when I know that my fatigue is two sided, twice the burden, twice to bear things born once. This is the nature of fog, sitting in it, keeping it out by closing a window that has never kept it out, that never closes that wills itself open even when you know you never closed it, because the act of closure is a dogged one. This is how fog creeps into everything, every little space, a crevice of uncertainty. The fog is a reminder that every black and white construct can make a gray area, this is a place where choices don't have to be made but one can sit with one's own thoughts for a spell, relics borrowed from the fog and due to be returned once they've been processed and addressed. This too is a kind of fog...

From the Abbey

How many to be judges
so few and a debt
for each to pay
in tomorrow's currency:
stock and bone
flesh made stone
which earthly
remains remain
as the dead knowing
it's better to be
alive.

DVM SPIRITUS HOS REGET ARTVS
So long as breath controls my being.
-Giovani Batista Moroni (portrait of a man)

London Fog

I wish I could say that it's just fog, I mean that would be grand, but I get enough of that back home in San Francisco. No, this is much worse, much, much worse; this is rain and it's been making a mockery of me and my camera gear. I take it out, it starts raining, I put it back in, it starts raining... what the bloody hell is going on? I'm being chased by a big fat gray cloud that is dumping on me wherever I go... it's not fair I tell you...

So now that I got that out of my system let's get down to brass tacks... how much for the pint?

Before I left Russia Nellman said to me: "London will drain your bank account faster than any other city on Earth." Guess what, he was right. I've had to stop myself from computing the cost of things. I mean 2 quid for a cup of joe, sounds great, right? Wrong that's 4 bucks! I mean I don't think it's that expensive at a baseball game even. I pulled 200 pounds out when I arrived and realized I was grabbing 400 hundred dollars, oh well, that's how it goes. Maybe I'll win the lottery when I get home. Ha!

My first full day in London, and Erez's birthday was a long affair. We started the morning by walking to Westminster Abbey which is about five blocks away, or somewhere there about. What can I say about a house of the dead? I've never seen so much art in service of the dead. Well that's not entirely true too, but I swear the British are like the Egyptians in that they glorify their pharohs in one house rather than building a separate one for each and every single one of them. This is probably good as the whole of London would be nothing but one big graveyard otherwise. Westminster Abbey is an amazing place. It really is in that it houses world famous writers, poets, in the poet's corner and monarchs that have defined not only English history, which ultimately affected most of the world if we're to believe in the old addage: "the sun never sets on the British empire." I was a little disappointed to find out that photography was verboten in the abbey. I would've very much liked to have taken pictures of some of the graves and monuments. I remember pausing for a long while when I reached the coffin of Elizabeth and then Henry the 5th. These figures are not only the stuff of history and myth in the western world, but they're also a kind of literary icon considering that Shakespeare wrote two of the most stirring speeches in the English language when he penned Henry the 5th (St. Crispen's Day and Once More Unto the Breach) but that he wrote in Elizabethan England. It's a wonderful place, and frustrating as well. Every nook and cranny of the abbey is filled with a stone to someone or other. There are modern figures like Laurence Olivier and Winston Churchill and of course obscure generals and what not that earned their rights in the afterlife by dying gallantly in battle. Yet, there's this put on air about the whole thing, a kind of over romanticism about the building and it's contents which are naturally invaluable to the character and spirit of England, but somehow over wrought and now thought of as invaluable. I think most monuments fall into this category in one way or another. The austerity of Arlington isn't that far off from this place, but maybe the open space creates a kind of quietness about it, that the containment of the abbey, filled with tourists, can't quite create, or mute their over zealous and rude footsteps on the heads of so many defining personages from history. It was a mixed bag and I'm not sure why, but I thought back to a book that Boobar had with him on Benjamin and Monuments. I have a feeling I'll be looking to my dear friend Walter Benjamin for advice on this one. I did find one thing slightly curious, it was a stone in one of the chapels near Elizabeth's grave and it was a curious stone that had a crescent moon on it that looked more like something you'd see on top of a mosque than an icon in a Christian church. I asked a priest about it who flashed me a smile and said hello outside the chapel and he didn't know why it was there. Eventually, after walking out of the Abbey i asked one of the robed guides and he couldn't remember the exact significance of the stone, so he called his manager over, a man named "Eddy" and he too couldn't quite remember why that stone was there. He postulated that it might be part of the family crest of whoever was buried in that chapel. After some more discussion I proposed that this person's family might've been involved in the crusades and possibly had a stake in the Jerusalem of the 12th/13th century thereby bringing that bit of iconography into his or her family crest, which he thought was possible. He was a nice fellow and I enjoyed talking to him. I went on to ask him if any of the bodies had been removed or bones moved and he said they're all there, except for one, a high protectorate of England who was exumed and then disposed off following the Reformation and that whole debacle with Bloody Mary. He had fallen out of favor, postmortem, and had been forcibly removed from his honored resting place.

After the Abbey we walked along to see Big Ben, Parliament, then along the Embankment where I shot a few pictures of the monument to those that fought and died during the Battle of London and the air raids. The words "Never has so much been owed to so few by so many" is etched into the stone of the memorial from a speech delivered by Winston Churchill. It's a rather beautiful memorial. Pictures are to come.

From there it was off to Picadilly and then Trafalgar as we contemplated buying tickets for Fiddler on the Roof. We've been toying with this idea for a couple days now and I'm just not in the mood to sit for a musical, I much rather be walking around. Yeah, great walking I'm doing thick with insomnia now. Poor Erez will be waking up in like an hour to head out to Aberdene in Scotland on business. He's had the last couple days off and has been wandering around London with me, but alas, it's back to the grind for all of us at some point, he's coming back tomorrow night... but man... it's going to be a long day for him.

Back to the day though... it was off to Covent Garden, I saw St. Paul's church, a lovely small church on the edge of the market with a beautiful garden wet from the rain. The trees here are majestic and seem to be as old or older than the castles. No telling how many survived the fires and German bombs that fell on this city during the war years, but nonetheless, they are truly regal. From Covent we found our way back to a small corner restaurant where we dined on Fish and chips (you have to once, right?) and then went back to Trafalgar which is being prepared for the Tour de France kick off in London. Not sure about that to be quite honest, but hey whatever floats their boats. You know Tour de France, France, I know I know, the British have always laid a claim on the French throne, but aren't we past that yet?

The national gallery was free and open late so we hopped in queue and found ourselves facia tu facia with Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks. WoW. What a marvelous work of art that shows off his three masterful skills: contraposto, sfumato and chiaroscuro. All three of these are at work in this painting. He has done small things that are completely out of character for other works of this period and earlier, the Christ child is not being held by Mary, quite the contrary, the baby next to mary praying makes you think is the Christ, but on the contrary that's John the Baptist praying to the Christ child which is closer to the Foreground and is being attended too, or meditated upon by an angel. To think that human hands found a way to glorify myth with such passion and force of conviction as to create a work of art that takes into account all of Da Vinci's amazing talents for physiology, science, graphic art etc is to really be impressed by the power of faith as the corner stone of art through most of human history.



There are some wonderful Titian's in the collection including the very dark Allegory of Prudence that features 2 three headed figures one composed of the face of 3 men representing past present and future and one of a wolf lion and dog representing prudence in an allegorical fashion of those that may consume the imprudent. A little message is included for the obtuse that might miss this powerful visual symbol in latin on the canvas: "learning from yesterday, today acts prudently, lest by misaction he spoil tomorrow."

Above and beyond the museum has a wonderful collection of modern art that includes Seurat and Monet, Van Gogh's sunflowers are on loan from the Van Gogh museum in the Netherlands and I was happy to see them again.

From the national gallery we went back to wandering around a bit and finally returned to Westminster to shop for groceries. We cooked dinner at home and drank beer and wine. I fell ill at this point, something didn't quite agree with me. I'm still not sure what it was, either old mayo that I had with my chips or maybe the tap water, who knows. I tried to rally and we went back to Covent Garden to make merry for E's 29th, but I had a devil of a time and started to sweat and go through the rigamarole of fending off a foreign intruder. I held it together long enough to make it to a Brazilian club called Guanabara that had fantastic music, a thin crowd that night, but some great dancers. A couple in particular, really caught my eye and I watched them for a long time. He was obviously the stronger dancer of the two, she wasn't half bad either, but you could tell he was definitely in charge and would make corrections to her moves when they were not in line with his intentions. It was the bosa nova mate, and it was good. He would push and pull her and she had a radiant smile on her face. I grew nostalgic for our somewhat drunken dance sessions at Achtung Baby, that cavernous cellar in the back of some 19th century building that we couldn't quite stay away from. It was far less graceful than what I saw that night, but it was just as passionate and at times unforgettable in the sheer bliss of the moment as we all of us, madmen and women, writers and all, glided across the dance floor.

Well I'm going to call this a night for updating the blog. I'll tell you about the Tate and the southbank tomorrrow or some other time, It's four in the morning, Erez is up, and I'm going to hit the sack... once he leaves, so maybe I'll post some scribbles from my notebook before I go though... adieu...

London calling

It's the clash and it's not the clash, it's something alright. All the cars are moving in the wrong direction and you have to mind the gap. I pulled money out of an ATM today and realized that the sum I pulled out is double what I actually received. As Josh said before I left St. Pete's "London drains your bank account like nothing else!" Well that's fine... sorta... I don't know... it's a beautiful city. I'm sitting here a block away from Scotland Yard feeling very secure, sorta.

I arrived in Heathrow to find that the authorities had shut down Terminal 4. All the connecting flights, international I believe, were cancelled and passport control was a mess! We sat on the plane in what I can only describe as total gridlock. There were five other planes trying to get into their slots when we touched down. When we finally entered our docking slot off the runway the captain announced that the mobile stairs hadn't arrived yet. This was nothing compared to the 10 switchbacks of the line to get through passport control. After walking through, finding my luggage in a sea of bags I walked into the terminal building and there was Erez pretending to be the paparazi with his camera out taking pictures. I could've strangled him, the last thing after dealing with a massive hangover from the night before, that I wanted, was to be photographed looking like death warmed over.

Saying goodbye to friends in Russia was painful. I can just imagine them right now going to bed and or wandering in from Achtung Baby after having danced the night away to bad mixing and tall cold beers. Boobar and I woke up shortly after 10 in the morning. I think it was close to 5 when we finally went to bed. The boat ride was the perfect thing, or method of exiting that city. To see the Winter Palace and Hermitage from the water, along with the opening of the bridges is how the city was kind of meant to be seen. The buildings aren't terribly tall in St. Pete's but their massive size, big fat constructs hiding even larger and more spacious courtyards makes for deceptive sense of distance. On the river things are put into a little bit more perspective. Everything in St. Pete's is massive, and then you get to London and the sense you get here is that everything has shrunk and has been packed in tightly. The streets are tiny and the facades of the buildings remind you of Amsterdam except that nothing is leaning quite in the same way as those old Dutch buildings, falling and being supported with metal tie rods and all kinds of hacked engineering to keep them in place. I'm in total withdrawal, I dropped a coin in the Nevya last night, and made a wish... I was as I am now a little nostalgic... ok, a lot.

So anyway morning started out painful, really painful. My normal state of being in the mornings is one of slow moving, stale breath from too many cigarettes, beer vodka and whatever else we had for dinner that night, and I can usually shake the haze in a matter of minutes. I wish that was the case this morning. No, the haze lasted for most of the day. I don't remember who it was, maybe Jessie, but someone handed me a shot of cognac on the boat, this ontop of two different kinds of beer (the boat had warmm bud on it, disgusting) and then there was the vodka we had at Kilikia, about 700 grams of it... between friends, toasting to an absent comrade in arms, the cognac did not do me good, or the beer I had when I got Achtung Baby. That was a really bad idea, achtung baby... it was absolutely unnecassary, we should've just gone back to the mini hotel and drank the good vodka boobar had in the fridge, but no, we went, and we left quite quickly. I feel a little bad, at one point I saw Boobar get up to go and without saying goodbye to anyone, as I had sad many goodbye's before we embarked on our river/canal ride, I left, ran out of the place, I was feeling quite drunk and just had to get home... self preservation instinct I suppose. Shaking the fog was tuff, but I managed to shower, finish packing and then Boobar and I headed off to Zoom. Now this was a monumental moment for Mr. Dostoyevksy himself, James is never awake before noon on the day of one of his walks, but for me he was up and out at 11 am to go have breakfast. Mariya joined us for a quick bite and I was able to say goodbye to her then. She left and then Sasha joined us. Casey came through Zoom and she took down my email addy to keep in touch and so forth and so on. Boobar and I sat with thousand yard stares, like Sheen and Dafoe in Platoon, we were completely indifferent to those that crossed our path for any number of reasons. We finally disembarked from zoom and headed back to the mini to get my crap. From there it was a walk to the 301. Nastia, young Tanya, Gleb, Timur were all in the office. Low and behold here comes Igor up the stairs... "let's go eat" I just ate, "nah, tam yeda na hooya blat! let's go have real food" Igor, my cab is coming in 20 minutes. "ladna, ok, I'll see you off" I miss that crazy bastard... so he did just that. I had a throng of well wishers seeing me off, it was sweet, touching and made me want to change my ticket, but maybe this place will be good for me, a little decompression, a little something different... maybe just a breath of air... but I miss the stench of ladas and moskvitches, the thick summer air of the swamp on which the city sits and the stale breath of good friends drinking well into the night... mostly I miss them all...

So tomorrow, it's erez's birthday, we'll walk the town a bit, shoot some pics, if I can, I'll rouse myself extra early to try and catch the london eye which is a five minute walk from here, in the morning light, and then go to the tate and or british museum, not sure which yet, but we'll figure it out... I think we'll take a walk arouund Westminster and visit the churches in the neighborhood... and hopefully, nothing will blow up while we're out and about... a big cheers from fish and chip land...



From that night in Fort Ross or Grand Cafe Nevsky when I was called as backup because two very drunk Russians were harassing an equally drunk Igor and company... this is what happens when Igor takes pictures... that's the right logic, right?

Leaving...

I'm leaving to London tomorrow... I'm all set, not packed yet, but mentally girding my loins for the trip... I'm not ready to go... went to Banya with the boys... tired as all hell... had vareniki with sour cherries in them... a little slice of heaven that's full of aroma and memory... now I'm just killing time waiting for the boat ride and trying to relax a bit... definitely not ready to leave quite yet... maybe I'll write a poem later called "Not Yet" and it'll be about all the things that we do that we aren't ready to do, but still feel the need to have done because we know they are what is necessary even if we're not feeling that way... or maybe I'll just close my eyes for a bit and wander around the streets of St. Petersburg in a dream... in either case... nu vot... eta kak skazka konchayitza ve etom momente...