Letter to Alien SETI Programmes, etc, II

San Francisco: Berkeley, Bjork, Bay to Breakers, Bookstore, Bars, Bridge

I went for a tour of Berekey (campus/hills) with Sarah Sorsby's Austro-Germanic-Polish friend Hania on Saturday – a PhD candidate in neuroscience (yawn) – and she was a delight. We saw two metallic dragonflies in the hills: one was a vivid metal blue, the other, sheriff's star silver; both featured in Pan's Labyrinth.

Scultpure and Sather Tower, UC Berkeley

That night we went to see Björk and Joanna Newsom at an outdoor amphitheatre in Mountainview, near Stanford and directly opposite Google. The Silicon Valley circlejerkers had blue, red, yellow and green cones in the driveway entering their massive complex to discourage concert-goers from parking there. A few adult-sized children’s bikes – ones with small triangular flags in the Google colours – were leant against the buildings, unlocked.

Self satisfaction is rife in SF, of course. The Bay to Breakers was a case in point, a massive, largely drunken run/keg push from the Embarcadero to Ocean Beach (7 miles) feat. plain hippy girls with painted tits and strolling old men with their dongs out. Still, there were some creative keg-pushing vehicles on display: bulls, ships, wheelchairs. Each year, a bunch of people dress as Salmon, have sex at the breakers and then run the race back to front, upstream, and very slowly. When they reach the bay nine months later they give birth to babies with foetal alcohol syndrome.

The concert. Despite her practically summering in Wgtn, she's there so often, it was the first time I'd seen J Newsom, lit with pale smurf-blue light that coloured everything but her red lips, cheeks and dress. She has the most amazingly theatrical expressions as she sings. Someone compared the way she pulled her face in all directions to a stroke victim, a Sly Stallone, but I think it worked for her. Björk was historic (pagan poetry was epic) and danst up a storm. She had a fine Icelandic brass section with ridiculous bobbing headplumes and two guys on 'electronics' - one of whom was 'playing' a touch screen, manipulating planets to help the audience visualise his contribution to the music. But her set was a little short: tut tut Björk!

I saw Miranda "You and Me and Everyone We Know" July (see short: http://www.wholphindvd.com/issues/issue_1.html) on Valencia street last week. The place was so packed that she had to climb a ladder in high heels (plus purple socks and a lime green skirt) to read where everyone could see her, atop a bookshelf. She was as absurd and hilariously self-aware as the characters in her stories.

Quotes:

'My boyfriend and I both fantasise about other people during sex, but he likes to tell me who he’s fantasizing about, and I don't.'

'I thought these were just my starter friends.'

Tourism.

NZ Marianna turned up for a bit and we hit Haight St, Amoeba Records and the Painted Ladies, the houses behind the lawn where Mary Kate and Ashley Olson were toileted on Full House. There were seven ladies, as if one had formed each time Marianna sang the theme to Full House on the way there: 'Whatever happened to predict-a-bility?' Irrelevantly, irreverently, I had the theme to the Fresh Prince of Bel Air in my head the whole time.

We also visited the Grateful Dead’s digs. It was a purple Victorian house, indistinguishable from the other houses in the neighbourhood but for an embarrassed looking family – two baby boomers and their teenage kids – standing outside and wondering if the landmark warranted photographs.

Alcatraz was beautiful as the day’s last rays of yolky sun poured through the bars.

The Golden Gate bridge causes more suicides than any other landmark, but it seemed nice enough to me.

On average, someone jumps from the bridge every fifteen days. The 67 metre fall lasts four seconds and jumpers hit the water at about 120 kilometres per hour. Ninety-eight percent of those who jump die. In 2006 the California Highway Patrol removed 70 apparently suicidal people from the bridge.

At four feet tall, the fence alongside the bridge is barely over waist height but, moronically, costs and public opposition have thwarted attempts to have suicide barriers erected. Crisis counselling phone lines have however been installed on the bridge and walkers are not permitted to cross after dark. In an effort to cull the seething plague of cyclists in San Francisco, people with bicycles are buzzed through security gates and allowed to cross at night.

Intuitively, the best argument against erecting a barrier is that it would do no good, people would find another way to end their lives. This is untrue. In 1978, Richard Seiden, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, released the results of a study of over 500 people who had been prevented from jumping off the bridge between 1937 and 1971. Only about 6 percent had gone on to commit suicide in some other way.

Engineering and environmental tests to establish the feasibility of a prevention fence are due for completion in early 2008. Then ‘next steps’, or the lack thereof, will be decided.

Mel Blaustein MD, President of the Psychiatric Foundation of Northern California, wrote the following in 2005:

It only took New York 16 deaths to erect a barrier on the Empire State Building. The French waited until 352 had jumped from the Eiffel Tower before erecting a barrier. We are approaching 1,300 deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge and the time has certainly arrived.

On Prom

For the conspicuously initialled JZ

Though it was my very first Prom, there was an inevitability to the night that rejects a chronological retelling. The night is a proud, wounded body that fights the transplantation of such a poorly chosen organ. It fights it in every cell.

Instead, rolling the night in my palm like a fat glass marble, I’ll begin in as good a place as any. How does the story end? As stories must when love’s denied: with tears and a journey. (I’m not sure there were really any tears, but certainly a number of journeys. Most went home for the summer, the first years and those second years with jobs, fellowships or the inability to escape the gravitational pull of IA will return. I left for San Francisco.)

Seen this way, it was inevitable that Dan Rosenberg would out-Atlas Atlas, carrying poet Zach Savich, who himself is a world of worlds and, because he is a bogan, a world of underworlds.
00:16

And of course at the afterparty at Kevin Gonzalez’s pad Dan would out-Atlas Dan, hoisting Dean Young and every single colour stitched onto his cowboy shirt like a flag that yells ‘Prom!’ to distant ships at sea.
03:17

The prom queen and king would, of course, be crowned and ensilvered respectively and – because it was decided democratically – no-one would understand how they had won their titles.
23:24

GA looked like the next presidential prom king of the United States but that is scarcely worth mentioning, given the number of next presidents that come through the town. Still, Georgia might well have won the title if it weren’t for the intimidation of the syphilitic genius ghost of Al Capone who haunts Alcatraz (and summers in the forest near Oz) to this day.
21:06

While syphilis ultimately reduced Capone to a gibbering moron, its neurological impact is thought to have contributed to creative leaps in the works of: Nietzsche, James Joyce, Arthur Rimbaud, Vincent Van Gogh, Gauguin, Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Tolstoy and William S Burroughs. Oscar Wilde was also suspected of ‘suffering’ the creativity-enhancing disease but this has been dismissed because, “Wilde never showed any of the warning signs of paresis—grandiosity, euphoria, or bizarre, uncharacteristic behavior.” Ha!

“Great wits are sure to madness near allied / and thin partitions do their bounds divide,” wrote John Dryden. Like athletes with illicit substances, the cruel, competitive arena of creative writing has led many of the poets at the writers’ workshop to experiment with syphilis to improve their work.

I doubt syphilis could’ve improved our impeccable rendition of the Fugees’ Killing Me Softly feat. Julia Wong, Blueberry, ACKM and GA. Alice, I doubted the freakoutability of your selection and I was wrong. I would like to publicly apologise. For what it’s worth, I had a postmonition that we would kick ass!
00:33

Rosenberg Wilkes-Booth-Lee-Oswald-Olivio spent much of the night trying to shoot me unawares, performing his patented ‘No Look / Skyhook’ photography. I tried to protect myself by keeping human shielding about me and was able to freeze most of his attacks with powers such as Eyebrow Raise, and the Glad Eye.
21:55 - 01:12

But he got me in the end, got me as he always eventually had.
01:24

The prom was hosted at CandyLand, a sweet dive on the outskirts of town. No-one told the regulars they weren’t invited. CandyLand kicked us out at one thirty. When would things get interesting? All proms have a scandal, right?
21:47

The preball, at Andy Starlings and Melissa Dickey’s abode. Adam Fell was dressed as a reporter from the Daily Awesome.
20:28

And it was the end and Zach and I had won Prom, because we had the coolest and classiest t-shirts and because we lasted longest; we were still going even after the rash deeds and misunderstandings that led to the tears that were or weren’t and the journeys in all directions.

Prom!

Prom!
Prom!
Prom!
Prom!
Prom!

Three Shout Outs

It's quite the achievement enduring the passage of time, not permitting him to abandon his constant march, settle down and start an organic avocado farm, nor let him break his leash and bolt off to sniff the other three dimensions.


For this, I would like to congratulate Tim on turning 26, Suggie on turning 25, and the Iowa poets and fiction writers who graduated this year. In addition to passing the time, the writers had the small, almost inconsequential obligation of submitting theses for their two years' work, which warrants a brief mention. Also, props to ma-maa for finishing her Dip Environ Sci, which she worked damned hard for.



I transported sug and Charles out here and magically suspended them in mid air next to the Golden Gate bridge. They were unimpressed with my feats of magic and gave me the thumbs down, but later admitted it was the thought that counts, and that I had been more thoughtless in the past, so counted their lucky stars. Then I sent them home and erased all memories of the visit.

ChicaGeographic

click to enlarge

A few papers cited important similarities between the film Old Boy and the behaviour of the Virginia Tech psychopath: ranting about vengeance, posing with a hammer, the fact that he used film to try to justify his deeds - implanting himself in an alternate (revenge film genre) reality where his actions might be seen as something less than delusional. I thought that was stoopid racist reporting based on the guy's ethnicity (he's Korean, as is the film)...

Until the creatures of Chicago's Lincoln Park were exposed to a screening of twelve monkeys and decided to rule the earth in place of humans! Look at the size of that ape! It's as big as a bus. Crime is caused by movies!

I caught the effect on digital sensor during the weekend I spent in town. A day strolling through the place taking snaps after Cinco de Mayo drinking (celebrating all things mexico, including the cultural avant guardists at Corona) was plenty pleasant.

It's an odd city - go two blocks from the 'magnificent mile', where the John Hancock building (complete with batman ear radio towers) is situated, and you wind up in the projects, as I did trying to find my way onto the El, the largely overstreet train. The contrast in wealth is stark. At least, income inequality was stark before the speciesist revolutions. Now every citizen of Chicago is equal, reduced to scrubbing their leathery overlords, which is why I left. Here is a picture of a rhino completing his shopping in front of the aforementioned JH building.

An hour at the Chicago Art Institute

The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y.
Georgia O'Keeffe
1926
Oil on canvas

Georgia said she saw the sun taking a bite out of the backlit Shelton building. I suppose the orange sun spots could be crumbs, or dribble from the sun's feasting. Dribble would explain why it is the spitting image of how I imagine fun, flattened, cartoony 1920s aesthetic. My sunspot (lower right) came out green because the sun - who is even slower than the Boosh moon - found out it was not the centre of the universe that day.

Woman Descending the Staircase
Gerhard Richter
1965
Oil on canvas


Richter's 'photo painting' is a nice play on Marcel Duchamp's Nu descendant un escalier n° 2 (a nude descending a staircase no. 2) below. Opening the shutter long enough to capture movement through blurring, and then transcribing this blurring into the painting is a kind of cubism - adding a fourth dimensionality (or third if you count height, width and time but not depth). I've added an additional dimension to Richter's by changing and layering the angles one could view the (flat) image from.

Oneupmanshiperized!


Nu descendant un escalier n° 2
Marcel Duchamp

Letter Home, to Alien SETI Programmes, etc, I

Happy Easter! Bizarrely, the septic tanks don't seem too fussed about Easter, despite their love of god and food. Good Friday and Easter Monday aren't holidays apparently, although 'holidays' are abstract concepts to the binge drinking authors, who rarely know even what day of the week it is.

The trip over here reminded me of my one attempt at goalkeeping - long periods of boredom interspersed with moments of mad activity. The flight out of akl was two hours late due to an engine falling off - an unnecessary hold up given that Team New Zealand World Police spokesman Peter Rider says 747s can launch w only two engines. This delay gave me the chance to talk to a hilarious american though, decked out head to toe in denim, heading home to San Jose. He called women crumpets and told me how they need to be buttered up...

The late take-off also meant we were rushed through LAX, which really was relatively lax cf my expectations although, sure, before boarding the connecting flight I had to carry my highly volatile chapstick and eyedrops in a clear plastic bag, and yes I had to remove my shoes, belt and jersey going through the x-ray (and then redress alongside the next person in the queue, hurriedly, awkwardly, like the conclusion of a one night stand).

Unfortunately, the flight to Chicago was late (again, an engine explosion), and so I missed my connection to Cedar Rapids, ran the length of the airport in order to make another, and arrived in Iowa with no bag (but couriered to me the following day) and, because I was late, no one to pick me up. Alice had already come and gone but, persistent bugger that she is, she commanded one of her minions to drive her back in to fetch me when she found out about the later flight. Home sweet home is Alice, fiction writer Kate and me, 520 S Dodge St, Iowa City IA.

So far:

I've sat in on a class, poet Dean Young's, in which we watched eye-slitting surrealist film An Andalusian Dog.

I went to see democratic candidate John Edwards talk at Prairie High School - there are a lot of would-be presidential candidates coming through Iowa at the moment as this state is the first to vote for its preferred democratic and republican representatives (although this doesn't actually take place until 2008). H Clinton, B Obama, and R Giuliani have all been talking around the state lately - at bbq's, diners etc.

Edwards' chat was sensible, if broad; he stressed negatie international perceptions of the US, preying on national pride to garner support for action on climate change, a phased withdrawal from Iraq and even universal health care. A weird scene though. Edwards was introduced by the portly assistant principal - decked out in chinos with a creepy cargo pocket, a pale pink shirt and a paedophile vest - and then the inarticulate county Sheriff, a moustachioed man who kept saying Edwards represented 'we the people' as if all the other candidates had ray guns and came from distant planets. He and his wife then ran out to the Foo Fighters and Aretha Franklin, shaking hands and commanding a series of standing ovation.

http://media.www.dailyiowan.com/media/storage/paper599/news/2007/04/04/Metro/Edwards.Pushes.HealthCare.Plan-2821755.shtml

The next day I went to a Jonathan Lethem reading at Prairie Lights book store. Lethem wrote Motherless Brooklyn (about a wannabe mobster/detective with tourettes), Fortress of Solitude and seems general obsessed with detective stories, kangaroos and cartoons. He also talked about the 'promiscuous materials project', an attempt to relax rampant copyright protection and acknowledge that good art often takes established art and makes something completely new with it - a man after my own heart. Bizarrely, Alice was hosting the after-reading party so that was a great opportunity to meet both him and a large portion of the 50 or so writers (out of about 100) who regularly socialise in an inwardised, emotionally charged group. Most seem to be in long term, long distance relationships, some of which are more tenuous than others. It was also, of course, a chance for the writers to meet Lethem, and there was much hitching up of breasts, straightening clothes and cautious party navigation to subtly wrangle a good chance to chat to him.

http://www.jonathanlethem.com/

The followoing night we went to The Picodor, a college hangout in a college town - young folk, smoke, hip hop, sexed up dancing. The following night was the American Legion, a Karaoke bar for earnest locals, perhaps a few veterans (The Am Leg was one contraction I didn't use after we arrived, despite there being no amputees present), and the writers go there with nostrils flaring, scenting irony. Two songs on the playlist were by New Zealanders, both Crowded house. Alice put 'Sam and friends' down for Something So Strong - only mildly less sacharine than Don't Dream it's Over but much improved by out of time yank yells. Dancing at the after party was great though: CSS, Peaches and MIA.

Okay! It's fcuking freezing! 57F = 12C or something - I oughta go move about a bit.

Still working on a signout phrase,

Sam

http://www.skype.com/download/

Why Oh WhIowa

Grant Wood, painter of 'American Gothic' grew up and painted this picture in Iowa. While he said the title referred to the gothic architecture (in particular, the building's arched windowframe), the subjects' blank, closed expressions, plus the pitchfork, make me read them as gothic fiction characters, a pair with a secret knowledge of something violent, deviant, diabolical. A horror.

I have become well acquainted with horror over the last month...









Click images to enlarge