Wednesday, September 15, 2021

Over the past ten days or so, I’ve been reading Paul Auster’s THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES, a novel that caught me off-guard with its charm and willingness to use a familiar character type from another century of story-telling as its first person narrator. The benevolent uncle is a figure I had figured would long have been relegated to a distant costume warehouse, but Auster’s dexterity at blending description and dialogue makes the improbable believable and left me feeling redeemed by the companionship of an imaginary character who will accompany me in my remaining allotment on this planet. I didn’t expect to be so moved by what amounts to an old-fashioned comic romance in which so many things that start badly, if not ominously, in the first half manage to reverse course by the novel’s culmination. It is probably the best possible novel that anyone could read at this particular juncture in this country’s history. I’ve always admired Auster as a translator, novelist, and literary advocate. Without his efforts, would Joe Brainard’s minor masterpiece be as well known as it is? I doubt it, and how could he not deserve substantial gratitude if not for that alone?

On a local level, our little corner of Long Beach was vandalized by a busy-border who apparently couldn’t stand the pleasure that the entire neighborhood got out of a bougainvillea bower kitty-corner to the house we rent. One recent morning we looked out from the porch, and it was gone! It’s been there for over a dozen years, growing ever more effulgently luscious as the source of a shadow anyone could enjoy while pausing underneath a stain-glass arch of translucent blossoms.

Apparently, someone claimed that it was a “public nuisance” and called some bureaucrat in City Hall and a notice was posted giving the owners seven days to chap it down or the city would come out and do the job themselves, while charging the owners for the cost of the removal?

By chance, I had taken photographs of it just a few weeks earlier, and this is the way I will prefer to remember that passageway.

Friday, September 3, 2021

Editing and teaching can involve reading an incredible amount of mediocre writing, and often editors are not even paid for it if the task involves poetry! One way for an editor of a poetry magazine to avoid the onslaught of truly pathetic attempts to write poetry is simply to run it on a solicitation basis. Sure, you’ll still get submissions from people who obviously haven’t read your magazine, but I agree with Ron Silliman: a poetry magazine is more likely to have a cultural impact if it is edited as a vehicle meant to call attention to a specific set of poets. It’s the editor who should establish the tone of the magazine, not the slush pile’s contingencies.

Alexis Rhone Fancher is that rare editor who somehow manages to filter the slush pile so that the publication now called CULTURAL DAILY has a distinctive “vibe.” Her latest find is Gustavo Hernandez, who has four poems featured at the following link:

Gustavo Hernandez: Four Poems

It’s not too often that I read a poem by a poet I’ve never read before and then want to read the next one. And I mean that word want. At a time when poets have seem to have grown lackadaisical about their line-breaks, Hernandez knows exactly what he’s doing. Perhaps he has already been asked to give a reading at Beyond Baroque, but if not, he should be given one as soon as possible. It’s a long drive from Long Beach to Venice, especially at night, but I would make the trip to hear him read.

Saturday evening, August 28, 2021

This show is up for only one more day. The exhibition opened at noon today, and closes on Sunday at 5 p.m. I recollect a call for work to be part of this show a while back, and apparently a couple of hundred artists ended up with a corner here, or a side office there, or a hallway in between to exhibit their work. It was impossible to look at everything for an equal amount of time, but as we wandered on four of the five floors allotted to this “pop-up exhibition” sponsored by the Torrance Art Museum, I imagined myself being the curator of a future show at TAM for which I was to pick no more than a dozen artists in the “Nomad” show. My short list of twenty finalists for the imaginary group show would include the following artists:

Emilio Garcia
Marty Knop
Jackie Castillo (“Torrance Financial Center”)
Travis Rice
David Eddington
Nancy Voegeli-Curran
Kim Abeles (“Hope Chest and Wringler Worms”)
Brian Thomas Jones (“Estimated Time in Traffic”)
Bill Dambrova
Meeson Pae Yang
Bryan Ricci
Charley Alexander
Maxwell Sykes — “Untitled” (Face)
Isai de los Angeles (“Hey man, I don’t actually eat the roaches.”)
Madeline Arnault (fiber artist)
Rebecca Bennett Duke
Francisco Alvarado
Nevena Prijic
Mike Chattem
Elizabeth Munzon

I must say that it took almost as long to find parking as it did to drive from Long Beach to the intersection of Hawthorne and Carson. The artists I just named made that exasperated search for parking worthwhile, however. More than worthwhile, in fact. Thank you.

I want to give special praise to the work of Emilio Garcia and Jackie Castillo.

For more, Visit: NomadArtShow.com

Location: 21535 Hawthorne Blvd, Torrance, CA

August 28-29, 2021

Noon-5pm, both days

Cost: Free

Address: 21535 Hawthorne Blvd, Torrance, CA

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

The Rolling Stones were founded almost sixty years ago by Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, and Ian Stewart. Stewart was soon relegated to being their road manager and an occasional sessions musician. Jones proved to be the most fragile member of the band, even if he was the most brilliant musician. Stewart died in the 1980s; and Wyman left the band a few years after the “Steel Wheels” album got things rolling again in the late 1980s. Another seismic shift has hit the original line-up. The news is breaking that Charlie Watts, an aspiring jazz drummer in the early 1960s who was drawn into the throes of the world’s most controversial rock and roll band, has died in a London hospital earlier today. For over a half-century Watts aligned the rhythms of The Rolling Stones with his stalwart cadences, endearing himself to fans with his self-effacing demeanor. Managing for the most part to avoid the worst excesses of popular music’s notorious life style, Watts was, in fact, the bemused foil to the seductive grandiosity of the band’s lead singer. Groupies were not his thing. He first met his wife almost sixty years ago, and the marriage endured. Along with his widow and his bandmates, a daughter and grandchild are also his immediate survivors.

For all of his prominence as the drummer of the world’s self-labelled “greatest rock band,” Watts’s original musical interest was jazz, and in the 1990s he used the money he made from drumming with the Rolling Stones to form a jazz orchestra. His interest in jazz was long known, not that he was the only member of the band with such inclination. Jones is said to have offspring after Julian “Cannonball” Adderley out of admiration for that musician.

Watts’s choices in percussion made significant contributions to the distinctive sound of his bandmates. One only has to listen to the inexhaustible resonance of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” to hear how Watts’s brief but propulsive solo interlude makes all the difference in how that “Hey Hey Hey” chorus churns the song headlong into the next full verse. Rae Armantrout has written about how much of an impact that song had on her as a young person living in San Diego in the summer of 1965, and I can vouch that it had an equal impact on me in Imperial Beach, when that tiny, working-class city had yet to be cut in half by an annexation to San Diego.

In a recent interview, Watts talked about his refusal to get a “smart” phone and how his steadfast allegiance to a flip phone irritated Jagger because the band’s lead singer and songwriting collaborator wasn’t able to send Watts documents and drawings for immediate approval. For someone still using a flip phone at that point, I felt as if my obstinacy had received a major social endorsement. Thank you, Charlie, for one last gift!

The Stones are set to go on tour, but I suspect that it will be a more melancholy event than even the remaining members of the band anticipate.

R.I.P. Charlie Watts (1941-2021)

Published, August 24, 2021, 10:34 a.m.

Post-Script: I first heard the news of Watts’s death from an article on Yahoo, which was far more comprehensive than anything in the New York Times or the LA Times. When I returned home, I found an expanded version of the New York Times obit, which concluded with a comment that Watts made about his relationship as a performing musician to jazz music:

“I’ve always wanted to be a drummer,” he told Rolling Stone in 1996, adding that during arena rock shows, he imagined a more intimate setting. “I’ve always had this illusion of being in the Blue Note or Birdland with Charlie Parker in front of me. It didn’t sound like that, but that was the illusion I had.”

Apropos of the above self-reflection by Watts, one might listen in on a brief broadcast commentary from NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/24/836037264/charlie-watts-rolling-stones-drummer-dies

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https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/rolling-stones-drummer-charlie-watts-dies-at-age-80-164430812.html

https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2021-08-24/charlie-watts-dead-rolling-stones-drummer

***********

Post-Post-Script:

One example of Watts’s drumming that I have not seen cited in any other article is on the song “Complicated,” which appeared on the American version of “BETWEEN THE BUTTONS” in 1967. His drumming, in fact, is not in the background but is instead at the forefront in defining the gendered resiliency that is at the core of the song’s theme. For any young teenager who aspires to be an accomplished drummer in a rock band, I would recommend listening to Watts’s work on this song and then practicing until you get it down perfectly. Once at that point, then start doing variations on it. Once you have deviated enough from it to make it unrecognizably familiar, perform it for the other musicians in the band and tell them that their task is to write a song with that beat. Only once that song is recorded should you play “Complicated” for them.

Scott Wannberg
February 20, 1953 – August 19, 2011

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the death of legendary poet Scott Wannberg, I want to send out a special note of condolence to S.A. Griffin, who has distinguished himself in nurturing the memory of this extraordinary poet. I also want to thank Perceval Press for keeping Scott’s poetry in print.

Here are two covers of early books by Scott, both of which he inscribed. In “The Electric Yes, Indeed,” my first wife Cathay (who died this past year) is also addressed. It is a mark of Scott’s indefatigable charisma that she was pleased to realize that she had met and talked with him in a bookstore at the old Santa Monica mall years before meeting me at Intellectuals & Liars Bookstore.

His poems remain among my favorite. Continue to rest in the exuberant resistance of your poetic visions, Scott. What a gift you gave us.

**********

August 17, 2021

It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve posted anything on this blog. Instead of enjoying the chance to expound on current events in literature or politics, I’ve been working on writing two SCOs (SCO stands for “Standard Course Outline”) for new courses at CSULB: one for an upper division course in creative writing in poetry (English 306) and another in fiction (English 305). I’m not paid to work in the summer, but guess what?

In my absence, the most popular posts in terms of my readership seem to have been a piece I wrote on the late Bill Youmans, and another piece I wrote on one of the founding members of The Rolling Stones. That’s an odd pairing, but it reflects my variegated approach to blogging. Successful ones, as I have noted previously, tend to focus on a single narrow topic. Since I’m not interested in establishing a base for advertisers, I prefer to write whatever catches my attention.

Speaking of the lack of advertisers, though, I see no reason not to freely endorse products that I like. Here goes:

HARRY’S SHAVING EQUIPMENT.
https://www.harrys.com/en/us

The best razors I’ve ever used.

For sunglasses, you can’t do better in terms of an ecological gesture than to indulge in the spiffiest ones I know of: KYND EYEWEAR.

I’ve never met Ken Baumann, the owner of Kynd Eyewear, but I hope more people support his project.

www.kyndeyewear.com

Finally, for those of you who prefer athletic contests in which you are the only one who pretends to be in the slightest control of a very whimsical ball, here are Brooks Roddan’s golf club recommendations:
Ping, cavity back irons with steel shafts, including 3 wedges (48, 50, & 56 degree; Ping 19 & 22 degree hybrids; Titleist driver 10.5 degree; Taylor-Made ’Spyder’ putter. You can get all this pre-owned and pretty cheap, according to Brooks.

Ian Stewart, who played briefly with the Stones in their earliest line-up and then served as their road manager for the first couple decades as well as an occasional session musician with them, was dedicated to golf and chose the band’s lodgings on early tours based on their proximity to golf links, or so the story goes.

*******

The big news is that Linda and I have lost our studio space in the Loft in San Pedro. We sublet the space from Meeson Pae Yang three years ago, and had hoped to keep working there indefinitely, but Meeson has to move out of her current studio space and so she needs to reclaim the space we’ve been using. We have to be out by September 10th. Right now, we have a meeting scheduled on Friday to talk with an artist about subletting another studio space. It most certainly won’t be as lovely as our current space, but in some ways it was a dream too good to last.

At least, though, we will be able to take part in one more First Thursday open studio event (on September 2) with our work up in the space we have grown to love.

First, though, I have to do a better job of paying attention to where I’m walking.
After working on the SCOs all morning, I took a break in the early afternoon, but failed to notice a scooter that was poking its rear end out from behind a lamp post. Sprawl city. I barely got my hands up in front of my face as I fell forward to the sidewalk. Fortunately, I didn’t break any bones, but I am scuffed up and my shoulders hurt quite a bit from taking the force of the fall.

FROM

“Three Hundred Streets of Venice California”

by Tom Laichas

Vernon Av

In the street, behind a parked car, a white hen pecks at the gutter.

I look over a wall. There it is: a small chicken coop, its door unlatched.

I find the apartment and knock. A woman answers. Behind her, on the floor, a bare mattress. Two kids sleep there.

I tell the woman: One of your chickens is in the street. She thanks me. Together, we catch and recage the bird, latching the door shut.

It’s like this: I live here, so I think I know things.

Then I see them: chickens and children.

I don’t know anything.

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

Venice Marine Biological Station

Here in the early twentieth century, Dr. Albert Brennus Ulrey established the Venice Marine Biological Station. Dr. Ulrey studied the supralittoral, eulittoral, and sublittoral, also known as splash, intertidal, and neretic zones. For his aquaria, he gathered mollusks, hydroids, trematodes, bryzoans, echinoderms, and salps.

A mollusk is a shelled creature, a univalve or bivalve. A hydroid is a polyp. A trematode is a parasitic flatworm. Bryzoans are microscopic invertebrates. Representative echinoderms include starfish, sand dollars, and sea urchins, all characterized by radial symmetry. A salp is a tunicate, related to the sea squirt.

One day, the County infilled the marsh and dredged a Marina: Basin A for the mollusks, Basin B for the hydroids, Basin C for the trematodes.

This dredging went on for some years.

D for bryzoans and E for starfish. Basin F for the urchins. G for the sand dollars, H for the salps.

Gasoline and lubricants leak from four-stroke boat engines. At each meal, the creatures digest petroleum distillates. The invertebrates die one at a time and then all at once.

We’re running a fucking funeral home, says a biologist.

So the Marine Station packs the aquaria, archives the notebooks, drives to the Port of Los Angeles, buys tickets at Berth 95, and hops the ferry to Catalina.

All that’s left now is Donax gouldii, also known as the coquina or bean clam. Children press its polished shells into sandcastle walls. The calcium carbonate gleams in the sunlight, brighter than bone.

“mollusks, hydroids…”: United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Report on the Progress and Condition of the United States National Museum for the Year Ending June 30, 1921.

********

What Will You Do Without Us, Streets?

What will you do without us, streets, on the morning we neighbors pack our possessions and flee, the Pacific back-slapping our shadows as we stumble east?

What will you do when we give up your sea-slick sidewalks and slippery asphalt?

Our house numbers will vanish, our property lines buried in silt and raw salt.

To remain with you, we’d have to slit our own throats, and fish out our unused gills. Our fingers would melt into fins. Our legs would fuse into flukes.

That life without a hand or foot: it’s not for us.

As we leave you, we’ll shred the mortgages and rental agreements. No sense in these heirlooms. Once we go, we’re gone. We won’t tell the grandchildren we lived alongside you. What is there to say? We were here and then we weren’t. That’s no story they need to know.

Goodbye, streets. Like sideways sand crabs, we have a tidal surge to outrun. When we return, we will speak another language. Don’t expect us to remember you. We will forget it all.

You’ll forget too. You’ll drown, and then you’ll forget.

********

Tom Laichas’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spillway, Aji, La Piccioletta Barca, Evening Street Review, Monday Night, Ambit, and elsewhere. He is the author of the collection Empire of Eden (High Window Press, 2019) and the chapbook Sixty-Three Photographs at the End of a War (3.1 Press, 2021).

Hello, Readers —

In the “big picture” of cultural work, it would seem that blogs as a genre are well past their shelf life “sell by” date, and yet I persist out of the sheer buoyancy of perky orneriness. One thing my persistence does allow me to do is to speak up for the more popular forms of current social media, including podcasts. One new one recently sent me an announcement that I wish to pass on to you:

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

ANGEL CITY CULTURE QUEST, Melina Paris’s new podcast, is live! In her passion and drive to connect you to art and culture throughout our Angel City, Melina Paris will share her joy in discovering what is behind artists and their processes. While passion is important, environmental issues are paramount, as well as those of social justice. Because of this Melina Paris will bring you discussions on those issues, too. Her goal is to fortify your craving for an inspired life, discovering from artists and activists directly what drives their work, while learning together ways to tend to our one home, and for each other.

You can listen to Angel City Culture Quest at Itunes, Spotify and IHeartRadio.

If you like what you hear, please like and subscribe.~

Podcast link
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/angel-city-culture-quest/id1578001267?fbclid=IwAR20LcCLXLsB8R-mBuqnTQXW40-QZi1O84-M1i44UJXgD83JufHkP_vij7Q

Bio Melina Paris

Melina Paris is Southern California based journalist and podcast host at Angel City Culture Quest. She blends her passion for writing, and connecting people to their community through arts, culture and social justice, with a focus on the thriving Harbor area cultural scene and that of greater Los Angeles.
Highlighting artists, activists and “outsiders” perspective’s Melina seeks to report on and contrast unique interpretations to create a valid, informed contribution to our cultural discussions. She has also written about subjects ranging from the environment and social justice to politics.
Her publications and websites include Random Lengths News, Culture Life Food Quest, Amass Magazine, Palacio Magazine, DTLA-Weekly, The Urban Howl, Tour Worthy and Infinity Artists Group.
Becoming a mother ignited Melina’s interest in wholesome, quality food. This combined with urgent environmental concerns has resulted in her ongoing education in food matters from a health and sustainability perspective and informs her environmental film reviews, restaurant reviews and other food-related pieces.

Melina Paris
www.instagram.com/culturequest
www.facebook.com/MelinaParisJournalist
twitter.com/ParisMelina

PAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

2714 E. 4th Street

Long Beach, CA 90814

Tuesday-Sunday 11am – 6pm
Closed Monday

562.588.7075

*. *. *. *

Living in Long Beach poses serious challenges. The air is filthy. Truly filthy. I am always slightly amused by the self-satisfaction that is on display at employer’s local campus. CSULB smugly proclaims, “We’re smoke-free!”

That’s great, but I would feel a lot more healthier if someone would do something to make the air I breathe at work particulate-free. If I die relatively soon, it will no doubt be from an illness exacerbated by the wretched air I have been subjected to during the past 15 years while I walk from my office to classrooms and back again.

In the meantime, I try to enjoy some of the “upside” of Long Beach, which includes one of the best “small” bookstores in Los Angeles County: PAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE.

For those of you who are not familiar with this store, I recommend the following article by journalist Melina Paris:

https://www.randomlengthsnews.com/archives/2019/05/16/turning-the-page/23249?v=7516fd43adaa

Page Against the Machine now posts its monthly best-seller list. You will note that number three is The Communist Manifesto.

Support a store that supports critique, without which no significant, lasting change can ever begin to take place.

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

Somehow I missed the news that Clayton Eshleman died this past January. I probably would still not know of his passing if it had not been for a comment made in a recent email from Doren Robbins, who now lives in Northern California but was a prominent poet in the Los Angeles scene of the 1970s and 1980s. Among other things, he was co-founder of THIRD RAIL magazine with Uri Hertz. Robbins eventually moved to Iowa City, where he received a MFA from the University of Iowa, and then on to Portland and Santa Cruz.

In Los Angeles, he was the organizer of a major poetry reading against the U.S. support for the government of El Salvador in its vicious repression of any dissent about the impoverished conditions of its workers and indigenous population. He asked other poets such as Clayton Eshleman and Denise Levertov to join him in a reading at the Church in Ocean Park, which remains an under appreciated cultural center in Los Angeles in that period.

Before I post Doren’s observations on Mr. Eshleman’s passing, however, I would like to post a few links to commentaries that appeared after Mr. Eshleman’s death.

Clayton Eshleman, 1935-2021

Steve Krause’s article provides glimpses of Clayton Eshleman’s life both in and out of the academy. It ends with a summation that probably sums up how many people feel about him: “You were a difficult, interesting, sometimes angry, eccentric, brilliant, and often a surprisingly kind friend.”

Eshleman and I were never friends. We were, at best, occasionally capable of being publicly polite to each other. I did (and still do) admire him immensely as a translator and honor his work on a pair of magazines that enabled American poetry to arrive at a heterogenous definition of postmodernity. I never understood why he felt so much disdain for me, but on this occasion I will leave my stories about Clayton for another outlet. In the meantime, I do want to say that I find it unacceptable — in fact, disgraceful — that he was not honored with a substantial obituary in any major newspaper of record. “Appalling ignorance” is all I have to say to those who deliberately refused to take notice of his passing. I am abashed that it took so long for me to learn of his death, but I am not exactly a writer who has a daily or even weekly connection with many other working poets for whom his passing would have been a stumble in their routine.

Other articles and notices include Ron Silliman’s blog as well as an appreciation by Pierre Joris in RAIN TAXI.

Remembering Clayton Eshleman

I will now let my comrade Doren Robbins offer his insights.

“Clayton Eshleman was an original poet and editor. I knew him for a while in LA, early 1980’s. While he had a reputation for being temperamental, I found him engaging, even brotherly. And impatient. But also astute in his opinions, and very cooperative and helpful when we engaged in a reading project protesting the civil war in El Salvador. I knew him first and foremost as Vallejo’s translator, discovered before Hirschman’s Artaud Anthology. Two seminal works for me. As an intense, unusual, and not always convincing poet (no one is), his work is worth further exploration. SULFUR was the memorable poetry, criticism, arts and commentary magazine of our time. There is a diverse scope, even generosity, in the community of poets included in its run of 50 issues. Eshleman took risks, but he knew what he was doing; he understood precisely what was at stake and he intellectually, imaginatively, and ethically comprehended the high stakes involved.” — Doren Robbins

Rest In Peace, Clayton. You were a lion of poetry who for some reason regarded me as a hyena.
Even so, I hope that future literary historians will honor your extraordinary contributions as a poet-editor-translator in a manner befitting the pleasure they gave your comrades.

My condolences.too, to your widow, Caryl, whose work alongside you certainly deserves recognition.