Our hotel, Paris, seems to be about romance and weddings. My daughter and I think that’s their theme. Or at least that’s one guess, as every hotel here has to have some gimmick — dancing waters, a shopping mall’s worth of shops, shark tanks, an erupting volcano, huge elaborate shows, major stars in residence — and other than the Queen musical (We Will Rock You) and a Filipino variety act (Lani Misalucha), this hotel seems mainly to be about simulating Paris.
The in-house cable channel that tells you what’s going on at the hotel is narrated by actors faking French accents. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what country they think they’re from. Lots of couples get married here — and have their photos taken with the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop. Women in wedding dresses float though the lobby and into the drive-up area. A romantic Parisian wedding without the hassle of dealing with foreigners, passports and possible gray skies — as here they’re almost always blue. There are brides trailed by photographers and family members everywhere.
The U.S. Army envisions a techie Star-Wars-Empire-style future for itself, including its own proprietary internet. All the easier for malicious hackers, “insurgents”, discontents, rebels and nuts to wreak havoc. Someone is making a lot of money and getting a lot in contracts from these boy toys. Here are the illustrations form the Times. Does George Lucas get a percentage?
A new government report places the “blame” for faulty intelligence about Iraq on the CIA. Blaming the messenger is an old trick — especially when the Bush administration didn’t want to even HEAR information that didn’t justify an invasion, and there was actually plenty of it. Data mining it is called — selecting information from whatever source justifies your position, and ignoring anything that might differ from it — that’s what the Bush crew did in the run-up to their invasion and now they are hoping to once again make the CIA their fall guy… but somehow manage to still avoid the issue of whether the U.S. should then, if there was actually no reason for invasion, actually apologize and pull out. Unbelievable. Especially if the U.S. media and public fall for it. And to think that the CIA is now appearing to be sort of the good guys here — not for giving faulty information, but for saying that they had their doubts about its authenticity and reliability.
Tom DeLay, the super visible Republican advocate for leaving the (sadly late) Florida Vegetable plugged in, unplugged his own dad years ago after he was seriously injured. Hypocrite? Sudden change of heart? Opportunist?
Dream:
Paul Simon and I are walking outdoors. In a city — New York, maybe. He has a weird bandage around his head, covering one side of his jaw, like those old cartoons of people with a toothache. When we near groups of people approaching he pulls up his shirt and covers his entire head — only one eye peeking out.
I ask him to “come up with something” and he somehow strikes up a percussive groove (on what? Not on guitar. Somehow the sound I hear is like congas, but there are none visible.) I catch the groove and begin to dance a weird step (surprise!) bouncing on alternating feet from side to side. Eventually I get the hang of it and we proceed down the sidewalk, me slightly in front, doing my boppy dance.
Paul compliments me on my dancing and I return the compliment: “well, that was a great groove.” Whereupon Paul relaxes and removes some of his head wrap to reveal a horrible elephant-man-like growth around his lower jaw and neck. It’s huge and fleshy, pendulous, pink. He tells me “it’s a goiter” — which may be true but I’ve never seen one like this. His voice is surprisingly normal sounding, which is incredible too, given all that stuff hanging off his jaw and throat.
Leaving Navajo country there is no more free range — now fences line the roads. No more trailers selling Navajo burgers and mutton stew plopped on the sides of the roads.
We stop at Walnut Canyon on the way to Flagstaff. An amazing hidden canyon with ruins part way down the cliff faces. The Sinagua, without water, as these people were called by the Spaniards. The river at the bottom of the steep canyon loops around a massive promontory, almost creating a towering rock island in midstream. Malu says it's like something out of Myst. It's snowing and the freezing wind is blowing hard — we hang on to the park handrails.
No one knows why these people suddenly left this settlement. They reportedly joined up with the Hopi, a little north of here. A Sinagua pot discovered at a nearby burial site was "decoded" and completely understood by a present day Hopi. There is some evidence that a foreign group swept through and left a trail of dead — hard to believe, as this place is the fortress one can only imagine in movies and video games. And you would think even if there was a war and massacre that some new group would take over the cliff houses, farmed plots and various living arrangements already in place.
We stop in Flagstaff and stay at the Weatherford Hotel:
Which seems pretty cool, and the Monte Verde, the other old hotel in town, was fully booked. The young staff seem friendly, real, loose — there are people hanging at the bar and the restaurant looks good. The bars and restaurants seem to be full of snow boarders and locals.
The rooms have no TV, no phone and the bathrooms are in the hall. The lounge with live music is down the hall from our room and the trains wail as they go by all night. Guess we should have booked something ahead of time. Nice vibe, though, even though the horrible progressive rock band in the lounge keeps us awake — we were warned before taking the room. I breathe out in my bed when I can hear one of the band announce "this will be our last song".
In the morning I stumble down to get coffee and there are two characters who both look like Yosemite Sam hanging out. The hotel doesn't do breakfast — they've got enough to do to clean up after last night's revelers.
The desert is green as we head towards Vegas. The unusually ample rainfall this year had made the normally beige and brown mesas and mountains turn green and fuzzy. It's sort of disappointing — one loves this area for the less welcoming more existential landscape that this usually is.
Up to Many Farms, Monument Valley, Bluff, Mexican Hat.
We stop in Blanding for lunch. At the tourist information center I an given two goodie bags which contain Tylenol and Advil! I immediately pop two Tylenol to alleviate some of the flu symptoms that are lingering. The young blonde man at the restaurant asks where we've come from — he has never heard of Cañon De Chelly, or Chinle. I suspect, as we are in Utah, he is Mormon and the Navajo and the tribal nations don't much interest him.
The earth is all around us is dipping and diving, convoluting and heaving and twisting and buckling... and we're riding on it on rubber tires in a machine made of steel running on fuels extracted from organic matter that was compressed and aged in earth very much like this. The dinosaur logo on the occasional Sinclair Gas station signs reminds us where gas came from, in case we forgot. The earth here is sensuous and awe-inspiring... even exhausting. Folds and curves and thrusting up and plummeting down. Jeesus. It's not like this back East. Back there God is big, but loving, gentle, sweet, green. Here He is massive, sexual, nasty, hot, fierce, bewildering and distant.
Malu and I went back to Taco Bell for lunch. Our capacity for fried foods has reached its limits and at least there we can get some not too greasy or bready fare. On the way we pass through Chinle again, past the Navajo single wides, sometimes repaired with bits of plywood, dirt yards, a junker or two out front, quite often a Hogan, made either of logs or plywood and tarpaper out front too. Whole communities of these line the roads, this one is followed by the Dine Youth Correctional Facility, the largest structure in town other than the High School. Across the street is the social services office, the Chapter, the Seventh Day Advendist church and then a Church's Chicken. A goat chews on some grass at the side of the road. Two young guys amble towards town, one wears a bandana over his nose and mouth like a bandit, but I suspect it's to keep out the dust, which is everywhere.
The 3 tourist motels are scattered amongst this. This one (The Thunderbird Lodge) is run by Navajo women and the clients are mostly families on vacation — like me and Malu. The parents usually appear from their rooms in sporty attire, running shoes and pullovers made of high-tech man-made materials, usually with a logo somewhere, nylon jackets. Most of the tourist men also wear baseball caps, the kids are usually younger than Malu, maybe for many it is their first family trip out west.
Malu and I came out here for her spring break. Navajo country — it's a national monument on Navajo land run by Navajo, so it has a less officious vibe than some of the other government-run parks. Plus, it's fairly out of the way, so it's not heavily trafficked. Malu had loved the horseback riding on previous trips here — they let you actually run the horses along the flat land at the bottom of the canyon. It's glorious, unbelievable. But that horse rental place was closed now — mysterious reasons were given. (drunkenness? A new zealous government supervisor sent by Washington?)
However, another horse place just outside the park was open and we drove there and there was a man named Shorty taking care of the horses and a middle aged man in total cowboy drag sitting by the stables. No one else was around.
Shorty has a weather-beaten face and a gnarly beard with a hand-rolled ciggie stuck into it — but I couldn't tell if it was in his mouth or just in his beard. He said sure, we can rent horses, but the guides are all out (you must be accompanied by a Navajo guide to enter the canyon.) A car pulled up and out stepped Victoria, a young Navajo woman who was promised to guide Mr. Cowboy into Turkey Canyon. Shorty said we could join if we want. It's a 4 hour trip. We did.
Not ten minutes into the thing Victoria is lost. She is off the trail, there are no markings, no hoofprints, and the instructions from Shorty were incredibly vague. We continue through the brush, ducking under low tree limbs and heading more or less in a southerly direction where the canyon should be. One can't see it, though — there are a few ridges and ranges in the distance, but any canyon ahead of us is well camouflaged by the more or less flat landscape and monotonous scrub. Even the larger Cañon de Chelly is invisible except from a few select overlooks — otherwise all one can see is an endless vista of trees and some mesas in the distance.
We spend almost an hour of hunting and pecking for the trail, making some sure but limited progress towards the canyon. Then Levi appears, another guide who does in fact know the way down into the canyon. He escorts us a bit, gets us sorted, and then he departs.
I wonder to myself about the legendary Native American sense of the land, of the earth, the oneness with the stars and the land and the plants... maybe that part didn't get handed down to Victoria. I suspected that my sense of direction was better than hers.
Whatever, the cañon, when we finally got to it, was lovely, deserted and silent. Anasazi ruins, more intact than those in Cañon de Chelly, nestled halfway up a canyon wall. The roof beams and even a roof were still intact. We stopped to rest.
Victoria said she thinks the Anasazi are related to the various pueblos in New Mexico — Yldefonso, Black mesa, Taos, etc. Their clumped villages are sure enough similar in form, as compared to the Navajo (or the Diné, as they refer to themselves) who live in houses or hogans out here on the desert flatlands.
Furthermore she claims that the Ana prefix in Navajo means enemy. She shares the beautiful Navajo lilt — their accented English is relaxed, calm, musical.
She studied art in Santa Fe and in some of those places felt discriminated against — that the Latins and Pueblo people who predominate there are given the benefit of the doubt, at least over Navajo folks, in those parts. Further north, in Durango, she felt more at ease.
She ruminated as she smoked a handrolled ciggie of Indian tobacco, grown nearby. She said the Navajo are matriarchal, and therefore the self-image of the men sometimes suffers. This sometimes joins with the genetic susceptibility to alcohol with devastating results. She herself, though only in her early 30's, is a recovering alcoholic, she told us. Rumor is that the other horse rental place run by her dad was closed on account of drinking. The pueblo people, in contrast, are patriarchal — the men can have affairs but should a woman be caught they'll adjust her nose so it looks like Michael Jackson's.
On the way back we passed elk prints, mountain lion prints, deer and bear — all near a waterhole... When we emerged from the canyon onto a dirt road the horses sped up as they recalled their way home and Victoria said, "you can run them if you want."
So Malu and Mr. Cowboy took off and Victoria and I took up the rear. My galloping horse suddenly veered off the dirt road, so I pulled up on the reins, only to spy both Malu and Mr. Cowboy sitting ahead of me in the dirt. At first I thought they were in a gully, as I couldn't see their horses. I immediately asked if they were OK They said they were, but people always say that. Malu had a huge rip in her jeans and I hoped she hadn’t be gouged by a sagebrush or one of the leafless hardwood bushes around here. She hadn't. She was lucky, those little spikey tough things are everywhere. A couple of bruises and cuts on her face, but otherwise she's O.K.
Mr. Cowboy tried to stand, but couldn't manage very well — his left ankle kept giving way — he said it was his boots. He claimed they were not good for walking. Uh huh. Whatever. If he'd seriously twisted or sprained his ankle I think he would have been grimacing — so I guess he was OK, but I offered him my horse to get him back to the stable, as he really couldn't walk at all.
He claimed he got off his horse "voluntarily" (his words) as the low hanging branches he saw approaching would have knocked him off. Sort of plausible — I had to duck and hug the horse plenty of times to avoid getting clunked, but really?
Spent part of the last week in NY catching up on art shows. There was the Armory art fair, which once was held at the Gramercy Hotel, then at the downtown armory, then at the Javits Center and now at a couple of piers in midtown. I am one of the few who admits to liking these things. Most folks suffer though them because it's a necessary networking and marketplace opportunity, but artists generally hate these things, as they cram everyone's work into relatively tiny booths. No one, for example, has time to watch a video at one of these affairs, there’s just no time, installations are pretty impossible and small work is, well, small — it suffers amongst all the hustle and bustle.
But I find that all that doesn't matter if one can simply enjoy what does catch one's eye — and there's usually so much to see at these things — it took me 3.5 hours to get through the 2 piers last Sunday. I didn’t take notes, I just wandered through, drawn to this and that. It levels the playing field in the sense that gallery reputations don’t matter, gallery location doesn’t matter and there are no slick ads, announcements or reviews to generate hype for specific artists or booths. It’s all what catches your eye — you notice the gallery names as an afterthought.
There was good people watching as well — obsequious collectors and gallerists, weird hair replacements and dye jobs, makeup inappropriate for mid-afternoon, and lots of attractive younger folks just curious.
The following Saturday I did a gallery stroll through Chelsea. There was an interesting film called LA by Sarah Morris in FP gallery that held one’s attention, though it could have served well as a travel ad for West LA. It was super well done and edited. Very slick. No synch sound. Lovely smooth dolly shots along buildings, paralleling people movers, pools and shop aisles... we're backstage at the academy awards rehearsal, the camera gliding around CAA, we're riding in a car with Dennis Hopper as he smokes a cigar, we see close ups of Botox injections, tanning salons, etc. — one would be tempted to claim that it was a critique of the superficiality of the place, but it all looked to good — and besides, people LIKE the superficiality, that's what they go there for, that's why they watch realty shows, blockbusters and read tabloids. It's something that is aspired to, not despised — at least not in the U.S.A. Morris is British, so maybe she personally despises some of what she depicts, but she must be in tight with someone in that scene to have gotten access to these locations and people.
Maybe it's like those David Hockney paintings from the 70s of LA swimming pools — one could say those depicted a superficial life as well, but they were so pretty and attractive that they made you want to dive in. As if Matisse had decided to paint mini malls and swimming pools instead of gardens, dancers and still lifes.
Damien Hirst's show was being talked about a lot — this one was almost all paintings, of more or less the same subjects he is drawn to in his sculptures and installations — pills, gore, purification and death. I'm sure he's a hilarious guy once you get to know him, it all seems a bit of a giggle. Being paintings one could claim these are more marketable — they at least would fit on a collector's wall better than a giant vitrine full of flies or cut-up livestock. But those sold for vast amounts, and very well I suspect, so why would he shift to painting?
A show of paintings done for pulp science fiction book covers is in a back room at Andrea Rosen. Oddly out of place, these slightly kitchy slightly ahead of their time, super detailed works done for hire stand out against the sloppiness in many other galleries. But I guess if fashion photos from the 40s, 50s and 60s can be viewed as fine art, why not these?
Sunday I take the subway to the Greater New York survey that just opened at PS1. Another massive collection, mostly of work by artists I'd never heard of. The Times slammed it in their review, claming it was market-driven or maybe that it was predictable. Whatever, I didn't have my hyper critical hat on — there was lots to like. A miniature shopping mall and its parking lot as a colossal aircraft carrier by David Opdyke. Aaron Young's film of a pit bull hanging in the air, its jaws clenched around a toy hanging on a rope, its legs wiggling this way and that as an off-screen voice repeats, "good boy, good boy".
Oliver Michael's video taken by a camera mounted on a model train — going through tunnels from room to room in a NY apartment.
Peter Caine's room of white creatures like the troglodytes in The Time Machine (original version).
Kent Henrikson's embroidered new faces (or masks) over existing embroidered cushions — turning classical scenes into what looked like cartoonish KKK meets Black Sambo tableaux.
Nina Lola Bachhuber had a bunch of nice red drawings.
The Atlas Group had a wall of photos of mangled car engines from Lebanese car bombs that I'd seen in Cabinet magazine and elsewhere.
Karyn Olivier added a kind of obelisk rising to the top of an antique coffee table...it rose up to and blended in with the gallery ceiling. A weird mixture of styles — 60s minimalism, architectural installation, funky bricolage — that pleasantly ignored any problem in throwing all these influences together.
Mika Rottenberg's tropical breeze film set in a shipping crate reminded me of some of Todd James' take-offs on signage that I'd seen at Deitch over the years. This film seemed to be about some imaginary handiwipe type product that was being promoted and sent via a pulley system to a driver of the sales van who was sweating profusely.
Jamie Isenstein had a fake painting called magic fingers — a framed hole in the wall inside which someone's real hand posed, and then suddenly moved and struck a new pose. At first I thought it was a animated thing, fleshy plastic over an armature — but it was a real hand, creepily disembodied. A young women stepped up and put a dollar in the hand, and it swiftly took the money and disappeared, reemerging with a new pose. I wondered if other people would try and tickle it, poke it, stroke it — it is so weirdly not human when we can't see the rest of the person.
Bush has flown back from Texas to DC to join up with the Republican legislators who will vote to overwhelm a court ruling allowing the removal of a feeding tube from a woman in Florida who is brain dead. Has been for 10 years. Those Republicans are such sensitive caring souls! And they work on the weekends, too! Bush couldn’t be bothered to be present in DC during much of the Iraq invasion, he played golf and took holidays — I guess this is a lot more important.
It seems to me this negates the balance of power concept I learned about in grade school — those checks and balances I remember reading about — it seems that now the powerful party in congress can simply vote to overpower the judicial branch if they see fit. The implications are staggering — basically the Republicans are saying, "we control everything, all branches of government bow down to our wishes." I don’t think this is quite what the founding fathers had in mind when they framed the constitution. It is exactly what the Nazis did when they eliminated everyone who disagreed with them from the various branches of government. They were elected, too.
Of course, if it was congress voting to overthrow a local court order that supported segregation, discrimination or a dubious execution I'd probably feel different.
Lil' Kim continued. DJ Kayslay says: "She was a female that stood up and didn't fold. There are brothers out there that fold every day."
Which implies that she maintained her story, implausible and transparent as it became, rather than implicate her friends and associates. She is prepared to do time rather than rat out her friends. Her loyalty to them transcends and supercedes society and the law — which in her mind probably never helped her much anyway.
Lil' Kim is convicted of perjury. She had said in court her manager was not in the vicinity of Hot 97, but surveillance cameras showed her and him on the sidewalk as he shot at rapper Camron's crew.
Hundreds of thousands of people have had their personal information stolen recently — identity theft, as it's known.
It was not hackers, though that's another issue, in this case the files were knowingly sold by a company called ChoicePoint who have more data on more people than any other. I seem to remember AOL being a source for some of their data — heads up, AOL users. This from the Times:
Data brokers can buy a wealth of private consumer information — including magazine subscriptions, recent purchases, travel records and the four crucial ingredients for identity theft: name, address, date of birth and Social Security number — from credit reporting agencies, publishers, retailers and other companies.
Alarming news from ChoicePoint, a company that compiles data on millions of citizens. It was only one of more than 140,000 such letters ChoicePoint has mailed in recent weeks, informing people like Mr. Lambert that computer files containing their names, addresses and Social Security numbers, among other critical personal data, had been inadvertently sold to "several individuals, posing as legitimate business customers.
Well, the sale wasn't inadvertent — they made money on it, one presumes, hence the word sale — but they failed to check on the buyer. Which is bound to happen eventually in that business. Ooops. Guess those folks will all need new identities now.
At Yale's suggestion we met at Luaka Bop with a man who is pitching a software that analyzes songs and more or less tells if a song will be a hit or not (www.polyphonichmi.com). Neither of us can afford their services, but it's fascinating. It's less insidious than it sounds, partly because it doesn't tell you what to do, it just tells you your score.
It also is cross-genre, so it tends to lump songs into "related" clusters (though they don't always know what is related about them)... so you find Nora Jones, Leigh Ann Rimes and a Nine Inch Nails ballad in the same cluster — related somehow — as the analyzed factors are similar for those particular songs.
The "structure" of the songs are related, or the melody, or the mix... one doesn't know exactly and it’s not always audibly apparent, so we are told.
Couldn't think offhand of a creative use for this thing, a non-business use, but maybe with some pondering...
Yale wonders if it could seep into other parts of our lives. I think it would be pretty hard to translate it over to food and clothes, as they haven't been digitized (yet) ...and the other information about them would require extensive polling. And polling is a different animal.
Komar & Melamid of the
World's Most Wanted Painting fame should know about this. Following poll results can lead to ridiculous solutions. There's a huge difference between polling people as to what they like and their actual buying habits. NO relation whatsoever sometimes. Of course people often don't know what they like until they see or hear it, and even then they don't know what it is they like about it. Polling is about polling, to some extent, and also about the limits of verbalizing and articulation. Where it stops and the realms of the unreal begin.
Beautiful scenery inspires affectionate behavior. Really? Does it? Do we have a sudden urge to squeeze our lover when we look out on a sunset, an awe-inspiring vista or a dreamy landscape? Is there a connection between scenery and personal affection?
Paul Wolfowitz, the lying warmongering spit-haircomber has been appointed by Bush as head of the World Bank. I guess the "world" part of the name World Bank is actually sort of facetious, eh? Kind of like the use of the word "world" in World Series. Europe is justifiably alarmed that this neo con lying dog now has even more power, the U.S. public and media are blissfully unaware that anything untoward is going on… or they report in the "unbiased" fashion the media has adopted in recent years.
The architect Renzo Piano was angry and stumped when the NY landmark commission refused to let him tear down 2 historic townhouses in his planned Whitney Museum expansion. He says the extra space is integral to his design — they say that may be, but it's not integral to a museum expansion.
The Whitney may be a historical landmark itself at this point, but that doesn't make it a beautiful building. It's a brutal arrogant slab, with a Bauhaus pedigree, more or less out of place in its neighborhood. Why it needs to expand is beyond me. But let that issue be. We're used to it now. That doesn't mean we need to agree to sacrifice another chunk of the neighborhood.
Piano is also designing expansions for the LA County Museum, the Gardener Museum in Boston, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Pierpont Morgan Library in NY, the Art Institute of Chicago and the new NT Times headquarters. Think he's spreading himself a little thin? Think all these places really need to expand?
The LA County Museum for years has been short of funds, they cut back on shows and on staff, closing many galleries on certain days of the week (you'd plan a day there only to find that half the place was closed — no money for staff, they claim). But they have 130m to expand. Hmmm. Someone's doing well off of all these museum expansions, and it’s not the public.
Waking up and emerging into the dark lobby and hallways of the W hotel where I am staying is like suddenly being tossed into an (upscale) whorehouse. At night the entrance and lobby is dark and moody and filled with scantily-clad women in various states of inebriation. They wobble on their heels and hike up their bustiers as the guys around them attempt to act cool. The staff, all dressed in black, affect an air of efficiency as they move through the crowds — talking on their earpieces and walkie-talkie phones. Addressing drunks in tones of utmost respect. Well, you never know who they might be, I guess.
A couple of nights ago I did my presentation at the nearby Hammer Museum. No relation to MC Hammer, or even to Arm and Hammer baking soda. Related to Occidental Oil. There's a wonderful show of local sculpture up at the moment... along with a video installation by Hiraki Sawa, whose work I'd seen and enjoyed previously in NY. (In the video his little apartment becomes filled with tiny planes flying around, like the airspace over a large metropolitan airport:)
The main show, curated by their Scottish curator, is called Thing, which is appropriate, as the stuff sometimes elicits a "what the hell IS that?" reaction. A full-sized car made of unfired clay, crumbling and decaying in one room, a sloth sits on a metal table which in turn squeezes one of those big bouncy balls that kids play with, a sisal doormat on the floor includes a sisal dog sleeping on it.
The show and book signing go fine. Afterwards I walk (in L.A.!) to a nearby restaurant on the way to my hotel to have a drink and a snack. A businessman at the bar was at my presentation and he says hello. He deals in California abstract art from the 20th century. He reels off a list of artists and I've never head of any of them. Soon he's joined by his date, a young yoga instructor, and he proceeds to impart tidbits of random wisdom to her. It's obviously their first meeting, and I can't help but overhear everything they're saying.
I drive the next afternoon to meet Pat Dillett who is working on a Mary Blige CD. He's been here for months. She likes the way he records her voice, while other producers "create" the tracks, delivering pre programmed beats and sequences that she writes over. All hip hop royalty are involved. Producers like Dr. Dre and Swizz Beats are involved, along with other hip hop and R&B royalty. Some of these guys are getting as much as 100K per track (are their beats really THAT good, to be worth that much money for some BEATS? Well, maybe they are, they certainly jump right out of the radio.) Jay Z stops by. The list goes on. Pat says the record budget MUST be around 2 million. No surprise. But as they'll make that back in sales (presumably) it's a safe investment. On a vastly different scale from what I do. Am I jealous? Maybe. Maybe not.
We meet for lunch at the Farmers' Market, one of the few places in L.A. with some history and genuine atmosphere — or so I remember. Now it's been engulfed by a huge shopping and movie complex called The Grove, which is truly amazing. It's like a Disney version of a street of shops in a small town, but all the shops are chains and franchises. The Las Vegas casino malls are similar, laid out like streets, with lampposts and, in this case even a trolley, but of course it's all completely artificial, like a movie set. No surprise there either, I guess, but I'm still in awe. Shock and awe. Maybe here movies ARE the reality, so the idea of making real life appear to be a set is perfectly natural.
We walk through the movie set street and enter the old Farmers' Market which hasn't been a farmers' market for years, but has a slightly run down (unusual for here) and casual eating area where you get your food on trays from various vendors and share tables, mostly with retired folks. In fact, the whole place seems to be retired folks, tottering buy holding their trays with their cream pies and giant apple deserts. I get a fresh broiled fish and it's pretty good. I offer to bus some of the trays scattered all over, but am told to leave them alone.
(Man next to me on cell phone here in LAX where I begin writing this entry: "I've got to do this PowerPoint thing for this big case we’re working on.")
Later in the afternoon I drive to Irvine for my talk, 50 miles south of here. I'm advised to leave at 3 in order to arrive by 5:30, and judging from my Santa Barbara experience I take this advice seriously. I join the traffic crawling on the 405 and we inch our way south. Past the airport, then towns that seem to consist entirely of auto-related industries — huge car dealerships and oil refineries, sometimes right next to one another. It's bearable for a while, but after an hour I feel like I'm going to go out of my mind. I've made a few phone calls — that seems to be how people pass the time in their cars here — and I've scanned the radio countless times. I check the vehicles around me, lots of SUVs, monster trucks, and folks stuck in deluxe sedans, the luxe is of no use to them now. I wonder if people here realize that the rest of the world doesn't live like this? I wonder if, as all this traffic just gets worse and worse year after year, people will eventually confine themselves exclusively to their home communities — people in Silverlake will NEVER go to Santa Monica and vice versa, hell, people in Santa Monica will probably eventually stop going to west L.A.!. The area will revert to little isolated villages. It's already somewhat like that, but as gas doubles and quadruples in price, as it's bound to do in the not too distant future, well, then only the wealthy will be able to suffer these hellish commutes.
The rented Prius hybrid car I'm driving does indeed get amazing gas mileage. The drive to Irvine and back and the one yesterday to meet Dillett and the gas gauge has barely moved. Why haven't all car companies quickly adopted this technology as an option? There's nothing inconvenient about it, as with the all-electric cars, and it's super quiet, so phone conversations and listening to music are easier too. Still, if I count all the hours spent in a car in the last few days, well, I'm appalled.
The talk goes well. Beforehand I take a nap on the carpet of the sponsoring professor's office. I wake up and have rug marks on my face. Angela Davis is doing a visit apropos an exiled Kenyan writer who teaches here, but I don't see her.
There is no dinner or reception afterwards, which I'm grateful for, as I need to drive back. Leaving the campus I see a flash inside a neighboring car — a gaggle of beautiful and slightly chubby Asian girls are taking pictures of each other using their phone cameras. A radio host — or maybe it's a U.S. senator — on the radio says he doesn't need another investigation into the abuses at Abu Graib — "they're terrorists and are dangerous and I don't need further information. Our people are doing a great job over there and should be allowed to do it." O.K., hear no evil.
The plane to Cleveland has just passed over Hoover dam. I can see that the water level in the "lake" is low. The desert is in bloom, a dirty yellowish green from up here, apparently it's filled with flowers due to the torrential rains here this year (then why is the water level low?) We're approaching the Grand Canyon. From this altitude and angle one can really see that it is a cut into a land mass which is like a humongous mesa. One can imagine the mesa rose up under a river, and that the river stubbornly stayed its course — not only its course, but its elevation. The water level remaining constant in regards to sea level, while the land slowly rose up, and the water sliced a huge gully in order to maintain its original place and level. Unlike the Australian outback, where all sign of human intervention vanishes, here there are numerous roads, powerline cuts and landing strips that etch across the landscape.
I'm headed for Cleveland — the Akron Museum, actually, for what will be the last of these talks. I think I'll put this one to bed after this. Retire it.
Now we're passing over Monument Valley. I recognize The Mitten and Shiprock in the distance. There's Gouldings hotel where you can rent videos that feature the rock formations you see out your windows. I remember watching John Wayne in The Searchers taking months of movie time to go a few miles.
Toni Basil told me over the phone that it must be the effect of doing these "stand up" routines that have improved my comfort level and relative ease on stage evidenced in my recent musical concerts. She said the last one she saw there was a huge leap from how I was previously. Hmmm. Could be. These talks, when I began doing some on another subject some years ago, were terrifying. Working without a net. Of course, I made it worse by trying out unscripted and unrehearsed material. I thought I could just riff on a series of images as I do in the office and studio. I thought I could be as clever as I thought I was in the company of friends, but in public. I imagined that a series of random riffs and musings would, through accumulation, magically add up to a coherent point of view. Maybe I am not as clever as I think, even amongst friends. In public the initial talks were a bit stilted and hesitant.
I tried changing them — and at one point the flow if ideas and images began to take on an arc, a structure. It was better. So, encouraged, and somewhat enraged by current events, I decided to make further changes — I added a beginning section that was a political rant — this was just before the U.S,-led invasion of Iraq. It went down like a lead balloon.
Confining the thing to one subject has proved better. I can use PowerPoint as a springboard to talk not just about presentations, but about perception, visual language, theater… well, a lot of stuff. And yet the spine of the talk kind of holds it together.
More than once folks asked that I show more of my own work as part of the talk. Maybe I should. Especially if there is no accompanying exhibition. Haven't figured out how to do that without killing the flow and the nice interaction between me and the audiences. Well, there's time to think about it — I'm going to take a long break from these things for a while.
