Koan Kinship — Bill Mohr's Blog

Los Angeles Harbor Arts
401 S. Mesa Street
San Pedro, CA
PUT TO SEE: 18 artists on exhibit
Reception: 2 to 5 p.m.
Saturday, September 7, 2024

Two visitors to LAHA, on Thursday, September 5, 2024, in front of a painting by Linda Fry

The Padres baseball cap is the one my father wore when my mother and he attended the only game that the Padres won in the 1984 World Series.
NOTE: WordPress insists on changing “MONEYBALL” to “Moneybag.” Autocorrect is such a drag.

“The game takes no prisoners,” Andrew McCutchen said. “It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter where you’re from or what you did to get you there. You’ve got to show up the next day and be ready to win. Can’t feel bad for yourself. Game doesn’t feel bad for anybody. Game doesn’t care who you are. Game doesn’t care what you did last year. Game doesn’t care if you were an MVP or an All-Star. You’ve got to be ready to go the next day. That’s what I’ve learned. I don’t care that I hit two homers today. I’ll be ready to go tomorrow, trying to win the ballgame. That’s what we have to do. Gotta put our big boy pants on and go…. We don’t feel bad for each other in here. We’re just going to shake it off and get ready to go the next day.”
— Andrew McCutchen, Sunday, August 11, 2024

Professional athletes are not known for being LBGTQ advocates. If anything, the homosocial legacy of professional sports competition has directly served to reinforce the normatively of heterosexual role-playing. The death of Billy Bean, a journeyman baseball player who come out of the closet after his playing days were over, this past summer was the occasion for a lengthier obituary than his performance on the baseball diamond might usually have generated, in large part because of his courage to publicly acknowledge being gay. Billy Bean’s name, however, was close enough to a more famous name associated with baseball, Billy Beane, that some obituaries conflated their careers. Beane (with an “e” at the end) with the protagonist and main proponent of “Moneyball,” the idea that careful evaluation of a player’s true worth on the field might enable a small-market team on a tight budget to have a competitive roster. It’s not unusual in professional baseball, for instance, for a large-market team (the Yankees; the Dodgers; the Red Sox, etc.) to have a payroll two or three times larger than a small-market team (the Pittsburgh Pirates).

The problem with the “Moneybag” approach is that it requires a genius — and a fair amount of luck — to pull it off. One can’t be merely a competent general manager and be successful with tis approach. A case in point this year is (once again) the Pittsburgh Pirates, who two-thirds of the way through the 2024 season were actually two games above .500 (56-54). Then the bottom, as it has frequently done over the past thirty years, fell out once again. In early August, the Pirates lost 10 games in a row; and there went the season. By the start of the final weekend in August, the Pirates had a record of 7 wings and 18 losses. It’s possible that they will win both of the remaining games of this month’s schedule, but I don’t know many people who are betting on the Pirates finishing 9-18 for the month of August.

So why have the Pirates floundered so badly this year? Andrew McCutchen’s observations at the start of today’s post pretty well sum it up: it’s a game in which what you did last year is irrelevant. David Bender was an all-start reliever two years in a row, and now his ERA is above 6.00 and he is directly responsible for the Pirates losing seven games in the ninth inning this season. However, is he alone in Major League Baseball in letting down his teammates? Not at all. Camilo Doval, a reliever on the San Francisco Giants, was an all-star game player last year. This year, his ERA shot up to 6.43 and he was sent down to the minor leagues.

Bednar’s performance in August has been far worse than Duval’s: How much worse? Bednar has a 10.97 ERA (13er/10.2ip) in August and has blown three save chances. Even so, one can’t place yet another disappointing season entirely on Bednar’s shoulders. All-star third baseman Hayes has had a subpar year at te plate, and the outfield defense ranks last in the MLB. The Pirates’ shortstop leads the MLB in errors at that position. Well, what can one expect from a team with the second lowest payroll in MLB? “MONEYBALL,” as I said, requires a genius. It didn’t take a genius to choose Paul Skenes as the team’s first round draft pick last year. Apparently, though, it takes a genius to realize the Mr. Cruz, at the very outset of his career, was far better suited to center field than shortstop.

The Pirates have a stunning stadium to play their games in. It’s a shame their fans don’t have players to watch to match that stadium’s quality. The San Diego Padres, on the other hand, can come very close to having an attractive stadium in an urban setting. While Padre fans have been waiting a long time for a World Series championship, and the odds don’t favor them this year, at least team management is fielding a competitive ensemble. As “Iron Mike Marshall once said, “Victory is the quality of competition” and at least the Padres will make the playoffs for the third time in the past five years. I wish that team much luck! “Ninety percent of the game is half-mental,” said Yogi Berra, and that applies to management, too.

Sunday, August 17, 2024

The Glass Ceiling of a Hundred Million Votes for Harris

The results of the most recent national poll will undoubtedly bolster the outlook of those attending the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week. I don’t want to be too much of a “downer” at the party, but I am old enough to remember how Michael Dukakis was leading in the polls after the Democratic convention in 1988, and that didn’t turn out too well, did it? The campaigns by Harris and Trump to become the next president will reach hurricane force in the next nine weeks, and it is impossible to predict the outcome of this “perfect storm” of mediated technology and kitchen table conversations. How many eligible voters will register for the first time, and how many will exercise their franchise? The answers to those questions sketch the trajectory of this nation’s fate.

*****

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/18/harris-trump-post-abc-ipsos-poll/?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wp_news_alert_revere&location=alert

“As Democrats gather this weekend in Chicago for their upcoming national convention, Harris stands at 49 percent to Trump’s 45 percent among registered voters in a head-to-head matchup. When third-party candidates are included in the survey, Harris is at 47 percent and Trump at 44 percent, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 5 percent. In early July, Trump stood at 43 percent, Biden at 42 percent and Kennedy at 9 percent.”

******

The problem with this kind of poll is that it doesn’t account for the “stealth” third party candidate who has twice in the past quarter-century changed the course of American politics: the presidential nominee of the Green Party. In both 2000 and 2016, Ralph Nader and Jill Stein siphoned off enough votes in “battleground” states of the Electroral College to allow George W. Bush and Donald Trump to be inauguaated. Do the consequances of these elections weigh heavily on te conscience of Jill Stein, as she prepares to mount yet another campaign that might forestall the election of the first woman (as well as the first womn of color) to the presidency? Not at all. If Jill Stein can attract just enough voters to give Donald Trump an electoral college victory, she will pour herself a glass of champagne and congratulate herself on a job well done.

Given the impact of the Green Party on the Electoral College, it’s still very featsible that Trump will emerge once again triumphant. Peraps, though, the buzzer-beater election I predict will conclude with an upset win by Kamala Harris. The election of 2024 is the culminating confrontation between the ghost of Roy Cohn and the neo-liberal faction of American capitalism. If Trump loses, consider the consequences. He is already scheduled to go on trial for election interference in the 2000 election. At age 78, what does he have to lose from leading an all-out assault on the electoral process? I predict that he will double down, though that may prove to be the “Captain Queeg” moment I predicted many years ago in this blog.

I repeat: what would Trump have to lose, if he opts for an even more extreme reaction to losing the popular vote three elections in a row? It is not too early, therefore, for those in charge of civil order in major American cities to begin to plan for Trump’s attempts to hold rallies on his behalf in the ten weeks following Election Day. People have the right to assemble and protest, and this right must not be abridged. If 80,000,000 people vote for Trump, they have a right to vent their disappointment that 88,000,000 of their fellow citizens voted for a woman of color. I am quite certain that they will feel that those who will vote for Trump in November will believe that the election was once again “stolen.” Can anything convince them otherwise? Very unlikely. Trump will claim that A.I was put to use to manipulate the vote, and what evidence would convince his supporters otherwise.

In the period in which Kamala Harris is madame president elect, Trump’s desperation will no doubt be the subject of scathing quips by such commentators as Stephen Colbert. Unfortunately, Project 2025 is not a joke, though the recent cartoon of Trump as “Hannibal Lecter 2024: accompanied by DJT’s comment that “I never should have published the menu” was very funny. The economic and social despotism that Project 2025 has in mind goes far beyond anything ever imagined by Barry Goldwater. The blueprint of the Foaming at the Mouth Radical Right is clearly articulated in Project 2025 and it should be taken at face value.

All of us, therefore, who believe that we are stakeholders in a system of checks and balances must urge as many people to vote as possible for Kamala Harris. The glass ceiling she confronts can only be shattered convincingly if, in fact, 100,000,000 people were to vote for her. There are more than enough eligible voters to have that happen. As improbable as such a turnout might seem, it may be the only way for this country to avoid another civil war. A definitive turnout that is beyond any conspiratorial reproach is imperative. Let those who support the Constitution of the United States of America and the flag for which it stands commit themselves to this unprecedented effort.

Sunday, August 11, 2024

Lately I’ve been thinking of how much the process of becoming a poet involves a close rereading of poets you believe you’re familiar with, and the extent to which that close reading is inspired by other poets’ knowledge of poems that deserve more of your attention. When I think of the late Neeli Cherkovski, for instance, I recollect a conversation we had about Bukowski’s poetry in the early 1970s, and in particular, the poems by Bukowski that appeared in early issues of INVISIBLE CITY, the magazine co-founded and co-edited by Paul Vangelisti. While both Neeli and I agreed that those poems were among Bukowski’s best in that period, what surprised me was Neeli’s admiration for the title poems of Bukowski’s second book from Loujon Press, “Crucifix in a Deathhand.” One might think it is one of Bukowski’s best-known poems, especially since it is as much focused on Los Angeles itself as an urban cyclorama as Blake’s “London” is on that environs. I remember digging up Bukowski’s poem after that conversation and wondering why Laurence Goldstein had not included it in his survey of Los Angeles-themed poems, “POETRY LOS ANGELES.”

Among Neeli’s prose projects, his WHITMAN’S WILD CHILDREN: Portraits of 12 Poets stands out as the best possible context for reading what turned out to be a posthumous collection of poems, which has just been reviewed by Paul Vangelisti in the Los Angeles Review of Books. It’s a shame that Neeli wasn’t able to go on a reading tour to promote this volume. I can only hope that individual readers let his visions come into focus as they read his poems for the mind’s ear. “I want to be a dead poet,” is a line Paul quotes at the end of his review. As readers find Cherkovski’s SELECTED POEMS, he will indeed become not only the dead poet of his aspirations, but also an old dead poet, the exalted fulfillment of his lifelong quest.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/alive-beyond-life/

Alive Beyond Life
Paul Vangelisti reviews Neeli Cherkovski’s “Selected Poems: 1959–2022.”

August 9, 2026

I lived in Ocean Park, California for 20 years and was a member of the Church in Ocean Park during much of that time.In the mid-1980s, two murals were painted on the sidewalls of the embankments supporting the Fourth Street overpass at Ocean Park Boulevard. About four blocks of Ocean Park Boulevard had traffic detoured to side streets when the murals were finished so that all of us living in Ocean Park could celebrate their completion and what they stood for.

I remember talking with Jim Conn, the minister of the Church in Ocean Park, at the formal celebration about the mural’s symbolism. At one point in our conversation, he said that this mural would be immediately understood in the Philippines, where political turmoil led to a people’s revolution powerful enough to drive the corrupt Marcos family out of power and into exile.

I drove by my old neighborhood the other day and noticed that the murals are still up and emanating their message of revolt against the panopticon.

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Even though Donald Trump will lose the popular vote for the third consecutive national election for president, Kamala Harris will most likely lose the Electoral College vote. I am hardly the first one to make this prediction, but I would like to frame it with a comparison to the finish of a tight scoring basketball game, in which a player shoots the ball toward the basket a fraction of a second before the game clock sounds off. If the score is close enough for that final shot to make a difference in who wins, it’s called a “buzzer beater.” Trump will triumph, but will do so primarily because of another iteration of a “buzzer beater” election, in which he manages to have the referee of the game (aka the Supreme Court) intervene on his behalf in the same way that George W. Bush had its assistance in the election of 2000.

The racist, patriarchal tilt of the playing field should remind us that the lines in Langston Hughes’s poem, “Montage of a Dream Deferred” are still as prescient as they were seventy-five years ago: In a section of “Montage” entitled “Children’s Rhymes.” Hughes has the skip-ropers chanting:

“By what sends
the white kids
I ain’t sent.
I know I can’t
be President.”

I’m afraid that Kamala Harris is going to be the second instance of voters in the United States rejecting the chance to appoint a woman to be the President. If a white woman was not acceptable, what are the odds on a women of color being elected? As dismaying as the answer to that question is, Harris nevertheless still has a better chance of winning than Biden did. At the very least, she will bolster a few congressional races. And who knows? Perhaps she’ll pull off one of the great upsets os 21st century American politics and force Trump to face another jury in a court of law, although this time it won’t be to face charges of financial chicanery, but to defend his attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election.

As to how a guilty verdict in Trump’s election interference case might play out, if Harris were to be elected President, I call attention to a very important article regarding presidential pardoning power.

The President’s Conditional Pardon Power

******

As a footnote to the above comment about Vice-President Harris being “a woman of color,” it should be emphasized that Trump as reverted to form and can’t resist the impulse to throw “red meat” to his MAGA base. This time, instead of doubting President Obama’s birth certificate, Trump is questioning whether Harris identifies as African-American.

Trump should have a voice-activated AI-driven computer attached to his ankle in the same way that people under house arrest have a monitor that tracks their whereabouts. Everytime that Trump relies on imagined misinformation, the computer should seeak up in a voice loud enough to drawn out his and correct the record. In attending Howard College, Harris could be said to have announced to the world that she identifies herself with the African-American community.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55690001

Monday, July 22, 2024

On July 19th, I wrote, but did not post, the blog entry below about this year’s national election. Over the weekend, Joseph Biden announced his decision not to to run for reelection and to support Harris as the nominee.

Yesterday afternoon, I floated to a friend my proposal that the Democratic Party should double down by having a woman nominated for both President and Vice-President. My friend said that the United States is too sexist and patriarchal a country to have the top two jobs being done by women. My friend is probably correct, but if is the case that voting-age Americans have twice been willing to elect an African-American male as President, but are not willing to elect women to that office, then claims that discrimination against women is more pervasive than racism have once again had their cases bolstered.

Even if Vice-President Harris selects Senator Mark Kelly as her running mate, however, I suspect that it will be very difficult to defeat Trump. The Christian Nationalist Party (aka GOP) is determined to win the election by any means necessary, and all one has to do to foresee the “perfect storm” ahead that is far worse than the “hanging chads” of the 2000 election is conflate the following two articles:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/major-mail-delivery-delays-raise-130000630.html

Louis DeJoy is not running for president, but he will have a disproportionate impact on the vote of the Electoral College.

My understanding is that no living person can be depicted on a stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service. We’ll see how long that rule holds up when Trump becomes president again. His supporters will no doubt claim that an image of Trump — in profile with a bandaged ear — on a U.S. stamp will exude n apotropaic aura. The “original” bandage that covered his ear at the CNP (Christian Nationalist Party) convention would, of course, be given the status of a religious relic at the Smithsonian.

Friday, July 19, 2024

Hey, hey, ho, ho —
Tired ol’ Joe has got to go!
Hey, hey, ho, ho —
He seems to be the last to know!

Joseph Biden has demonstrated that he is too old to be President not just because of his disastrous debate performance but because he is not able to absorb and analyze a rapidly changing political landscape. The chances of Biden being re-elected are so dim that his immediate withdrawal from the presidential race is the only hope his political party has for retaining any control of the national agenda on immigration, abortion, and foreign policy.

Who would replace him? Kamala Harris is not my first choice, by a long shot, since she is one of the most unconvincing orators in recent memory, but given her position as VP, perhaps there is no other option. On the other hand, what could the Democratic Party do in order to distinguish themselves from any previous presidential race? Double down! What’s needed now is not just the second instance of a woman running for President, but the first instance ofA women running for the offices of both the President and Vice-President. Harris and Amy Klobochar (or Harris and Gretchen Whitmer) versus Trump and Vance.

Anyone who thinks that Harris and Gavin Newsom would make a winning ticket might as well stick with Joe Biden. I assure you that Harris-Newsom is a dead on arrival combination with the voters of this nation at large. I would rather vote Libertarian than vote for a governor who does not hesitate to cut the budget of the already underfunded California Art Council.

Long Beach, CA — July 18, 2024

The first time I saw Bill Viola’s video art was at the Long Beach Museum of Art, an institution that in the 1980s won my affection for its tenacity in not letting a limited budget and exhibition space become an excuse for mounting anything less than shows worth a long drive. At that point, I lived in Ocean Park, thirty miles north of Long Beach, so setting aside a good chunk of one’s day off on a weekend was the major price of admission. LBMA was the first place at which I saw Bill Viola’s “Reflecting Pool,” which I lingered in front of far longer than I do for most works of art. Even though the technology had only become available in the post-modernist period, Viola’s poetics immediately struck me as being embedded in the pre-Socratic. Heraclitus and Zeno should be the starting points for tuning oneself up to encounter Viola’s work, although it wouldn’t hurt I thought to myself to spend a half-hour listening to Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports.” “Selecting Pool” exuded the calmness of the incomplete’s penultimate culmination: the transitory approaching the limits of the irreducible. It did not surprise me, therefore, when earth, air, fire, and water became central tropes in his “Martyrs” series.

Viola died at his home in Long Beach recently and is survived by his collaborator spouse, Kira Perov, and two songs. Viola indeed left profound gifts behind for many travelers to discover their nexus to “neatness.”.

https://www.billviola.com

The unfolding of consciousness, the revelation of beauty, present even after death, the moment of awe, the space without words, the emptiness that builds mountains, the joy of loving, the sorrow of loss, the gift of leaving something behind for the next traveler.
– Bill Viola

For further reading:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-07-06-ca-41-story.html

ART REVIEWS : ‘Waterworks’: A Summer Tonic at Long Beach Museum
by CATHY CURTIS — July 6, 1990 12 AM PT

*******

Bill Viola, Who Helped Make Video an Art Form, Dies at 73

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/jul/14/bill-viola-obituary

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2024-07-13/bill-viola-dead-video-artist

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/07/15/remembering-bill-viola-the-artist-whose-video-work-expresses-the-heights-and-depths-of-human-emotions

Tuesday, July 15th

I returned home from Olympic Valley last night, after a week of reading little else other than prose devoted to memoir, hungry to read some poetry. While stacking several boxes of books I am setting aside as a small portion of what I hope to give to the CSULB library, in 2025, I happened to spot S.A. Griffin’s collection, PANDEMIC SOUL MUSIC (Punk Hostage Press, 2023); one of the poems, “The Pledge of Aggrievance,” struck me as summing up the mood of many of us who are despondent about the undeclared civil war that may well have just experienced its Fort Sumpter moment. Let us hope that we, as a nation, can pull back from the precipice.

“THE PLEDGE OF AGGRIEVANCE”

I pledge aggrievance
to the flag
of the United States of Reality Show
and to the profit margin
for which it stands
on one knee
under siege
invisible and divided
with no civil liberty
or justice
we fall

— S.A. Griffin

(Copyright 2023 by S.A. Griffin; reprinted by permission)

Photograph by Bill Mohr
(c) Bill Mohr

I first heard of a place called “Squaw Valley” in 1960, when at the age of 12 I watched the American hockey team win the gold medal by defeating the Russian team, 3-2. Fourteen years later, I heard about a one-week writers’ conference that featured Michael McClure and Kathleen Fraser. Other poets who attended included Gary Soto, Gary Young, and Suellen Mayfield.

Fifty years later, with two chapters of a draft of a memoir completed, I headed back to what is now called “Olympic Valley” to bear down on the writing and to get some feedback on the project from David Ulin. It was a productive week, and I want to thank group #9 for sharing their works-in-progress with me and for their comments, which led me to reconsider the pertinence of a draft of a short chapter I’d written many years ago entitled “Ice Milk.”

I hope to have a complete first draft of my memoir about Momentum Press done by mid-November. I’m a slow writer, so this is a very ambitious schedule. There’s nothing like looking in the mirror and seeing how much differently one looks than one did thirty years ago to realize how little time is left to complete all that remains unfinished in one’s life.

I’m happy to report, though, that tasks are getting checked off. I just sent Michael Docherty the final revisions on a chapter on the “renegade” poetry of Los Angeles for his upcoming volume. for the Cambridge Companion Series.

Onward, indeed, with assiduous haste, even as I look back on a life far different than anyone who knew me in 1960 might ever have expected. It’s even a more improbable outcome than the victory of the American hockey team in 1960. Of course, such a transformation involves a “team effort,” and everything listed below would not have come to pass without the friends and comrades listed in a blog entry on June 18th.

****************

William Mohr, Ph.D.
Professor / Department of English, California State University, Long Beach
WEBSITE: koankinship.com. /. BLOG: billmohrpoet.com

Act One (1970-2000)
Poems and reviews published in over three dozen magazines, including Antioch Review, Santa Monica Review, Sonora Review, Blue Mesa Review, Zyzzyva, Beyond Baroque New, Hungry Mind Review, Bachy, and Invisible City, as well as in Hidden Proofs Bombshelter Press, 1982.)

Vehemence (Lawndale: New Alliance Records, March, 1993). 36 track solo project. Compact disc and cassette spoken word collection. Produced by Harvey Robert Kubernik in association with SST Records (founder, Greg Ginn, bass player for Black Flag.) Tracks highlighted by KCRW’s Liza Richardson.

Editor/Publisher: Momentum Press (1974-1988). This work was supported by four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as additional support from the Atlantic Richfield Foundation and the California Arts Council. The Momentum Press archives were purchased by the University of California, San Diego’s Geisel Library in 1996.

Visiting Scholar, Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), Fall, 1995.

California Arts Council Artist-in-Residence 1982-1984

Put Your Ears On: a poetry video show. 1990-1998. Producer and host. Century Cable Network.

Act Two (2000-2024)
George Drury Smith Award. Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, Venice, CA. 2014.

Literary archives (1970-2020) purchased by the University of California, San Diego’s Geisel Library Special Collections in 2023.

Displacements. Los Angeles: Magra Press. 2024. A chapbook of prose poems and a dramatic monologue.

The Headwaters of Nirvana Reassembled Poems. Los Angeles: What Books. 2018. This full-length, bilingual volume of poems is an expanded selection of the work done by my translators in Mexico, earlier in the decade. That collection, Pruebas Ocultas (Bonobos Editores, 2015) was chosen as one of the two dozen best books of poetry published in Mexico in 2015 by a panel of Mexican critics.

Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992 (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2011). Book reviews of Holdouts appeared in American Literary Scholarship (2013); Western American Literature (2013); and Southern California Quarterly (2013).

Bittersweet Kaleidoscope. (Los Angeles: If Publications, 2006). 21 poems, 37 pages.

Poems, critical articles, and essays appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), Chicago Review, OR magazine, William Carlos Williams Review, Journal of Beat Studies, Trampoline; Anacapa Review; Hummingbird; Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry; Blue Collar Review, SPOT Literary Magazine, Miramar. Caliban on-line, Pool, KYSO and Stand Up Poetry; An Expanded Anthology, edited by Charles Harper Webb (University of Iowa Press, 2002), as well as Cambridge Companion chapters.

Writing translated into Spanish, Croatian, and Italian. Poems selected for over a dozen anthologies.

Frequent participant and contributor to conferences organized by the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA), American Literature Association (ALA, and the Modern Language Association. Keynote lectures delivered at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; UCLA; and in Mexico City, Mexico, and Dijon, France. Featured poet at several dozen venues, including festivals.

photo: Jane Bullen