An adjunct life

A noble act based on friendship relies on patience and sometimes, good timing with even better luck. How else do you explain disembarking into fifty degree weather from single-digit temperatures without the slightest clue? Naturally this is what happens just as soon as I leave town.

It seemed a foregone conclusion that both my classes cancelled but oddly enough (or maybe not), wheels began spinning almost immediately and then suddenly two messages appeared. From the void came hope, a respite from the powers that be which sounded too good to be true. And so it was, this instinct proved correct. My good fortune as the deck of cards shuffled meant that another colleague, my good friend who recommended me in the first place to teach here, bend over and grab her ankles.

If not for foresight and an itchy trigger finger to finally follow through the proposed bait and switch might have screwed certain parties involved royally. Given the hierarchy which enables those tenured to usurp any adjunct, the unlucky loser left holding the bag usually ends up with nothing. As would have been the case as trading spaces meant relinquishing a preferred time slot more suitable in terms of convenience and schedule. Finally and fortunately a contingent plan (paying more salary) called back to confirm.

So the endgame of playing an awkward shell game while sweating bullets finally yielded bountiful fruit for the whole gang. When the merry-go-round stops, when the music ends, the three circling the chairs do find enough space for all to sit.

And despite the surreptitious phone tag, all is well that ends well.

A solemn duty

Another sad, snowy day by which to measure terms of closure.

It became in its mourning a tally of sorts, to see who in such circumstances simply shows up. No doubt, someone kept count. Eyes stared and heads swiveled about, all noting those in attendance and those conspicuously not. And of course among that select company the most glaring absence betrayed a lack of manners. Their impropriety as such then is an inexcusable trangression against the rules of civility, a symptom of vast and misguided egoes so self-involved that it failed to do the right thing.

But paying respects is more than giving face. Let bygones be bygones, no matter the vitriolic of past wrongs because that moment should not be the time for such pettiness. Sooner than later, though, the time for reckoning will arrive on hand.

Behind door number one is...

Monday Night Basketball or Survey of Art, Part Three (From Impressionism to Contemporary)...which shall it be?

So nothing like being on pins and needles awaiting whether next week will be the last evening of shooting hoops until the end of the spring term (which might be a crying shame considering that the nephew gave me a brand new Nike indoor/outdoor basketball for Christmas). Therefore to teach or not to teach depends quite simply on enrollment and to be honest, it looks bleak. So far, only one student is enrolled and the magic number ought to be double-figures at the minimum in order for the class to run. Not many people appear enamored of learning about modern art willingly. Too many bad cliches still persist.

But crossing your fingers sitting in front of the computer monitoring the real-time registration smacks either of desperation or dooficity. Somehow the latter says it all. It is after all good and needed income.

Our tax dollars at work

Try as hard as you may to walk the straight and narrow, life is full of minor annoyances. And like clockwork, it happens unsuspectedly. If you will, free-associate a rotating, swirling bolo flying out of nowhere that hogties your ankles from which, before any instinct can react, cartoon physics apply, yanking the rug from under causing your mug to be smashed flat against the pavement. Case in point:

December 29, 2003

City of Chicago
Department of Revenue
P.O. Box 88298
Chicago, IL 60680-1298

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing to contest the parking ticket # 0043884120-14 issued for code violation 9-64-190 (b) Meter Violation, Central Business District.

On the date in question of the supposed violation listed above, I parked my vehicle across from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago located at 280 South Columbus Drive in a metered parking space. The relevant parking meter numbered 900067 was inoperable and/or malfunctioning as indicated by a code “JA 77” which flashed from its display.

Just to avoid any possibility of a meter violation, I consciously pressed the button labeled “right” to indicate which parking space my vehicle actually occupied because another vehicle parked to the left of the meter wrote a note stating that the meter was indeed broken AND, to be doubly sure even sacrificed two quarters into the meter to no effect. In fact, one of the quarters sat in the slot without falling into the chamber.

Imagine my irritation to see a ticket placed underneath the windshield wiper upon returning. I incorrectly presumed that any competent parking meter attendant would notice the broken meter. However, such is always my mistake to give the benefit of the doubt especially to that most treasured of what our wonderful city offers---the civil servant. Again my only evidence to support my defense is the code “JA 77” (the first 7 was actually backwards) on the parking meter display as it is not my habit to lug around a camera to document any perceived parking infractions that I overtly seek to transgress.

Please allow me to thank YOU and the exceptionally wonderful work of your ever-vigilant office. It is, I might add, a pleasure to do business as always.

(sigh)

On watching Thunderbirds are GO! late night

Time to remember S.H.A.D.O.

Or Supreme Headquarters, Alien Detection Organization, the good guys of "UFO", a long-forgotten Gerry Anderson vehicle from the early seventies that used to air eight o'clock Sunday nights on Channel Nine right before bedtime. Naturally I begged Mom the extra hour just to see Commander Straker and his ultra-secret (super-technological) forces based in a hidden defense base on the moon battle those evil extraterrestials who crave to harvest human flesh as a food source. Not to be confused with its better-known counterpart "Space: 1999" featuring the then-husband and wife duo of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, both cast-offs, of course, from the original cast of "Mission: Impossible" (It seems the two gravitated toward adventure/fantasy series containing colons).

Which differs from S.H.I.E.L.D.

Or Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage and Law Enforcement Division that Marvel Comics issued with Agent Nick Fury, former sergeant of those "Howlin' Commandoes" from the Big One, World War Two and his cronies, Dum-Dum Dugan and Jasper Sitwell to fight the crime syndicate HYDRA.

Childhood heroes like childhood memories never ever die.

Technologically Lazy

Five-eight-eight-two-three-hundred, Empire...

The automated telephone system plus the proliferation of interactive web sites online really equals easy living. Those who thought jumping into your car to drive somewhere quickly ought to know that complete lazy-ass convenience of planting your butt comfortably typing or dialing some numbers away. Why find an excuse to stay home anymore? Real-life "human" contact is overrated. Besides any craving of flesh and blood can be satisfied watching any of the multitudinous "reality" programs on prime-time television. That in and of itself is enough to embrace your keyboard.

Because life as hard as it can be only gets better with machines. A blasphemous sentiment given the cynicism of cybernetic paranoia which foretell of gloom and doom from epic battles of man versus that very dangerous thing, the computer. Beware the circuitry rebelling, becoming sentient to overthrow the weakling that is the frail human race, as every Asimov-to-be whines. Growing up enamored of revisionist, modernist utopias supersleek and abstract begs for the modernity of science and technology that manufactures comic book gizmos into actual, workable gadgetry. Being George Jetson pressing a minimum of buttons, buzzing around in a bubbled flying saucer two-seaters or having a robot maid named Rosie clean your already antiseptic digs is our popular cultural (and technological) birthright.

So damn your lion-clothed Charlton Heston for screaming "damn". Tobor lives.

Frankly speaking

God knows (and He does) I love a hot dog. I can seriously eat one for each meal if left to my own devices. And this from someone who cooked Oscar Meyer weiners for breakfast between the ages of eight to eleven until a classmate perished the thought. Back then, the mush of pig parts and entrails wrapped in casing that functioned as my convoluted pre-adolescent logic basically lumped the frankfurter into the overall sausage family.

Charred, boiled, or even sliced in half to be pan-fried like Mom used to, any way, it matters not so long as these puppies ended up in my stomach. And dressed up, too. My motto is "Drag it through the garden, baby" or Chicago style. First a steamed bun-some say a poppy seed; others plain, either is good- and then the dog. After which follows a long squirt of yellow mustard and narrow furrows of raw, chopped onions, sweet neon green relish, two or three half slices of tomato, several whole but small jalapeno peppers and the piece de resistance, a shake or two of the celery salt. VIOLA! All your major food groups piled in one easy-to-eat packaged meal-to-go. A joint like Byron's even offers additional toppings like shredded lettuce and sliced green peppers for the ultimate choice of "Everything".

But for damn sake, NO KETCHUP (or catsup) ever. That stuff belongs on Coney Island red hots along with grilled onions or sauerkraut. The difference is geographical like deep dish to thin crust pizza. In Windy City hot dogs we trust.

The King is Dead, Long Live the Queen!

The inevitable happened and who can blame her, really.

Year after year listening to the former Trader Vic's barbeque chef critique the "tookey" prepared annually by his son as being "too dry" or the smashed, not mashed potatoes not being smooth and creamy enough like it used to be prepared in the Army by him for an entire battalion. And the weak culinary excuse of "it's supposed to be that way" for the lumpy consistency of viscuous gravy.

So no more willy-nilly recipes concocted from memory or wildly creative interpretations of tried and true traditions or slipshod, half-ass stop-and-go cooking just to catch the latest replay from the football game because the lady of the house now demands precision, exact measurements. "Follow the directions, actually read those cookbooks stuffed away up in the cabinets behind the cans of Van De Camps baked beans (that taste so damn good alongside a frankfurter, i.e., weiner sans the bun) AND FOCUS...stop going off on tangents being easily distracted while the food burns!" she commands. Those days of laissez-faire holiday meals belong to the distant past as sadly, meekly and humbly I relinquish the spatula.

Tomorrow the wife dons the toque, assuming all responsibility to roast the bird as well as all the fixings. The king is dead, long live the queen!

A Manhattan Night

Sad to say, but Charlotte continued a recent trend to imbibe heavily. Ordinarily, a cold soft drink of the Coke family suffices to quench my thirst but somehow the temptation of a per diem on the road justifies the frill of liquor. Sitting at the sushi bar downing Kirin after Sapporo to chase warm sake tastes so much better washing down expense account sashimi. Of course, this is succeded by a nightcap of single-malt whiskey at the bar watching the latest scores on ESPN.

It started innocently enough in Boston actually with the Pappy. The two of us passed the evening away, waiting over an hour and a half for a table at Legal with a couple of Black and Tans. After the surf and turf and trekking in blustery chill about a half mile only to discover that all showings of Lost in Translation sold out, the remaining option left meant activating the backup plan to locate a bar for drinks. So to avoid the cold weather, we headed back in a cab to the hotel bar, a lovely place called the Encore Lounge which immediately proved an inspired choice. The bartender played the straight man for the comedy act that was the piano bar and subsequently Amateur Night. Five Manhattans later listening to the semi-professional wannabes from Ole Blue Eyes to imitation Ethel Mermans only added to the illusion of the booze going down smooth.

Imagine shooting the whole wad drinking. What next...discotheques?

Year of the Monkey (Devil Child)

Time does fly.

The devil monkey child himself turns twelve today. And for someone composed of genetic material predisposed to Sumo proportions, his lack of food intake-which is not to be confused with his appetite as the boy loves his sweets- beguiles the whole family especially considering that his former linebacker dad Willie is often mistaken for Bolo (think Asian muscle man/karate killer from Enter the Dragon) and his mom, my sister, the former high school cheerleader, packs on some meat herself.

But his aversion to eating seems not to affect his height at all. He already stands five foot, two inches tall, with an adult shoe size of seven and a half, weighing a mere eighty pounds tops, a veritable skinny beanhole much like his uncle was at the same age. Those genes rarely fall far from the tree, you know. Or perhaps what really accounts for being thin as a rail might be his strange and very un-Asian dietary habit of eating cheese as if born in Sicily, a weird medical hypothesis given my lactose intolerance that resulted in years of my father every Saturday morning hauling me on the Clark bus headed all the way north to Howard for an allergy shot in my butt at first and later my upper left arm (which may explain why I never flinch at the sight of blood, or sharp needles for that matter).

Yet given his size, the perplexing thing vexing his parents especially because of their former athletic glories is his complete disinterest in team sports. When asked by his sports-obsessed family who religiously golf, hurt themselves annually playing full contact tackle football at the family Turkey Bowl, play league Chicago-style Clincher slow pitch softball (no gloves allowed, baby) or shoot four-on-four indoor basketball which sport he likes the best, no doubt the not-so-subtle pressure weighs heavier than the two hundred and fifty pounds of barbells and dumbbells on a bench in his basement. It somewhat pained them at first to slowly realize their son is not the next coming of Ichiro, but to their credit, both resigned themselves to his lack of hand-eye coordination. Simply put, my nephew is a bookworm prone to mathematical geekiness, the chatty, studious type who loves geography, Mario Brothers and Harry Potter.

So good for him that recently he began taekwondo lessons out of his own accord. Already he broke a couple of boards to achieve his yellow belt.

So for his birthday, another book might be in order. Perhaps, the whole set of the Chronicles of Narnia.

Yeah, not a bad present at all.

"Love, Exciting and New..."

Finally, love conquers all...

Especially at the business end of a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun. But as usual the only redeemable part about this overseas Hatfield between McCoy feud facsimile might be the sweet music playing when the guilty parties mouth, "I do." Somehow the inmates running the asylum left the door open to the room housing the victrola where the only songs left were:

1) Pachelbel's Canon in D
2) Debussy's Clair de Lune
3) Mozart's Romanze from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
4) Tan Dun's Eternal Vow
5 and 6) Sade's By Your Side and Kiss of love
7, 8 and 9) Roberta Flack's Feel Like Makin' Love, The Closer I Get To You and Tonight, I Celebrate Your Love (with Peabo Bryson)
10) Barry White's Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe
11) Destiny Child's Dangerously in Love
12) The Reverend Al Green's Let's Stay Together (long version, of course)
13) Ole' Blue Eye's (Love Is) The Tender Trap
14) Macy Gray's I Try
15) Toni Braxton's Breathe Again
16) Babyface's Lady, Lady
17, 18 and 19) Taiwanese love songs from the sixties by assorted artists.

Strangely the needle still worked.

So Bob Eubanks, what say you to magnanimity and allow the newly wed contestants at the very least a thirty second headstart before setting the hounds loose? Before this sorry excuse for Sadie Hawkins Day turns into a lopsided three-legged potato sack hop.

Hell, it is only the decent thing to do.

Notes on achieving masterhood

Thin planks cleft in half, splintered and serrated edges reconstructing a karate chop. Jujitsu flip the whole bundle around the broken joints without any wood glue. It builds character and external form from the hip, bent forward with eyes trained on the target. Losing sight prompts a sneer and the punitive whack upside the head. So how thick is the color yellow?

Contrary to popular belief, boards do actually hit back.

The loneliest numbers

Our world, that wonderful talking box, continues to crumble.

First the Tunnel King permanently "slipped on a bar of soap" and magnificently subtracted yet another integer from that magic number of seven. On the road to Zanzibar that is to be expected. Because even centenarians eventually wear out their welcome onstage awshucksing the crowd, waving the flag while one-lining prewritten material. But that paled in comparison to what happened last night on the irony of all days.

The Man in Black said "don't to worry" one last time and who else but Jack Tripper seriously pratfalls. And the ring of fire burns brightly and loudly. Chrissie, though, is shocked, dropping her Thighmaster to the floor. Where in heaven is Tex, anyway?

Three is company after all.

Remembrance Because of Things Passing By

On Highway 301 South, Edisto Drive, one mile out of Orangeburg just past the rosed gardens, he pointed ahead to the oncoming bend in the road, at the fruit stand owned by Jewel and her oldest son Monte Philips now that her husband Monroe passed. The corrugated structure still looked makeshift despite all these years, a silver revival tent around which a fairly modernized refrigeration system kept the perishable produce fresh as the van sped by. The old place should be only one minute away on the left.

Hong Kong Restaurant, where the Brother Reverend Heywood headed twice a week after his show for his Lobster Cantonese style, shut down almost fifteen years ago when the ungrateful sons of the landlord refused to renew the lease. Flanked by an outdoor pool, the ranch building housing not only the kitchen and dining area but party room and huge pantry for storage, belonged to the Palmetto Motel, part of the small empire of businesses run by the fittingly named Wilson Lee, a roly-poly walking cliche of Mayberry, RFD which also included a slaughterhouse whose roadside billboard advertised "custom killing". Their delusions to convert the banquet room into a fancy nightclub called Bogarts proved too fancy and too rich by way of entertainment for the resident redneck folk unaccustomed to such city extravagances. This fatal error in judgement began what proved to be the dismantling of a business, the ruin of a fortune and the besmirching of a legacy.

And as the van turned into the vacant lot, nothing remained except white gravel. Nothing so much as a grave marker for any to see. All but the memory is gone.

Pak Pui Chi

Too much caffiene from endless cups of joe and way too many packs of Marlboros over the years ate away at his scrawny musculature, shrivelling an already skinny man even skinnier. The effect is positively skeletal. His legendary vanity a mere shell of what once was, when as family jokes go decades ago, a younger Miu Wa caught him in front of the mirror meticulously blow-drying and primping his Vitalised side part, caterwauling, "You are so beautiful...to me, can't you see..." even ornerier than Joe Cocker.

Looking at the scarecrow in front of me now, it is painful to conjure up those images of the Chinese Tony Manero who used strut about Argyle Street sans paintcans as Hip Sing, betting the ponies and clacking the mah jong tiles. Of him playing the swank Playboy Club Keyholder trying to emulate the lothario alongside the notorious black sheep of the family, Uncle Chuck. Or to watch the man scootering about in his Chevy Vega, barely negotiating the old ninety-degree-angled S-turn on Lake Shore Drive en route to Chinatown proper with family crammed in the combustible back.

Sure, every Christmas after waiting tables at Tin Lung every night six days a week, he deemed to herd the brood of his nieces and nephews, all five of us, downtown on the El into Woolworths or Montgomery Ward for our annual pick of model battleships or the latest Barbie (Only one gift per kid, though so as not to spoil our pampered Americanized asses). But that was then.

He is sixty years old, fifteen years younger than his older brother who looks prosperous.

Walterboro, SC

Off Jeffries Boulevard the faded, peeling sign looked unhurried as twin rows of empty lightbulb sockets rimming around the rickshaw font letters sat lazily still, completely out of time. Not long ago an attempt to repaint it produced the circus effect of badly outlined lipstick. Its worn bareness stood out against the electronic debonair of its city-slick cousins like a neglected child left home alone.

The parking lot adjacent the building allowed for willy-nilly angled parking as is countryfolk custom. Loose white gravel crunched beneath our weight, casting ghostly-powdered footprints on the linoleum floor entering our China Garden.

Water-stained wood panelling populated by framed orientalia around the ubiquitous aquarium of pale carp greeted a meek hey. To the left of the glass door, a warped greasy counter concealed an old-fashioned cash register, short stacks of take-out menus and stabbed tickets the only evidence of business. Next to it rested two gumball machines filled with sugared candy. Above these two football schedule posters from ten years ago listing local propietors pronouncing the obligatory allegiance to either Clemson or South Carolina are scotch-taped to the wall. Both walls flanked by rows of red-vinyl booths enclosed a smattering of mismatched Wal-Mart tableclothes covering four-top and long tables; it is a place that has seen better times.

Third uncle Chi and his wife who were watching ChinaStar network news on the satellite hookup in the back while doing sidework step out front, arms open to welcome the all of us back home.

"water passes slowly through flatlands."

Or so it seems racing like a bullet down endless asphalt highway, pitch-black save for flourescent dashes whose hypnotic Morse Code spell is only broken by the staccato mechanical snores of the devil monkey children, outstretched and crucified as if painted by Gericault; their alternate wheezes, snorts and neighs an odd urban Cagian orchestra incongruent to the Grand Ole Opry playing on the front windshield.

All signs pointed to Yoknapatawpha County until dawn when one exit ramp away from Walterboro, other cars in the faster outside lane began their telltale chorus of honks. Immediately we knew. But of course the innocuous slow leak in the front passenger tire my sister hinted at is now a crumpled and flapping flat, so much so as to be unsalvageable. Lucky for us the tire shop happened to be less than two miles down the road and just three blocks around the bend from China Dragon.

The mechanic who prescribed the new Goodyear only required five minutes to install, even rotating the back passenger tire to the front. Inside the run-down shack of an office cooled by dust-caked room air conditioner circa 1970 fake wood-grained model aided by an oscillating electric fan tucked behind a chrome hubcap display, the owner scribbled out the bill while pontificating against the big make as we waited, sweating. Outside it was ninety-four degrees, sunny with about ninety percent humidity.

Just like I left it nearly eleven years ago.

On the road, again

Go, Speed Racer, go.

The last time was so long ago, leaving Dodge high on the saddle, Passport set on high and blackhawked Belfour in the crease flopping around on-the-air. That cannonball run mimicked all the previous ones except now add on Trixie, Pops, Spritle and even Chim Chim. The whole kit and keboodle. Only poor Sparky gets left behind. Back then, the Mach Five cum Protege blazed a blistering pace no slower than ninety hours miles per hour. John E. Law be damned.

Those were the good old days. Set the clock and aim for the Skyway after rush hour down through Indy headed toward Memphis passing by Dollywood into the Land of the Colonel before winding the Blue Mountains on the edge of the Tobacco Road in twelve hours flat, give or take a stopover or two for fuel and the occasional leak.

And all for what? Just to languish the dog days in ultra-slow motion as the breakneck hustle and bustle of the big city readily fades in the rear-view mirror? Tailgating two inches behind a rusted Chevy chugging along ten miles under the speed limit teaches that lesson, you know. No, the real reason to head south is to trow the ubiquitous U.S. Army-issue duffel bags taxidermied with frozen ribeyes, boxes of jumbo shrimp and the occasional striped bass from the Santee compliments of Drunk Uncle Chuck, he who fills the beer glass with two ice cubes before pouring a lukewarm Lowenbrau upon waking up.

Third Uncle Chi deserves a break today long enough to welcome a distracting game of mah jong. Gambling courses through the blood, of course and with his brother the casino boat VIP pocketing a roll, let the tiles clack. Besides food aplenty beckons.

"Here he comes, here comes Speed Racer...he's a demon on wheels."

Rerun (Not Fred Berry)

So it made me laugh. The sheer chutzpah of Dirty Dozen on Ice forced a tear of irony. Rugged G.I. Joe murderer's row cons effeminately figure-eighting background routines while slitting Nazi throat really asphyxiates the funny bone. My stomach hurt to see classic old school being Disneyfied as kitschy hogwash because such clever postmodernism is pure genius. Besides how can anyone weaned on k-rations and snap-to hospital corners not cheerlead the Jim Brown lookalike speedskating the chimneyed grenade gauntlet? GO! GO! GO!

Speaking of "the navy gets the gravy but the army gets the beans", it happened again, feeding the insomnia.

Nonchalantly an empty and overturned helmet washed ashore and aground in sandy beach appears in black and white and the next four hours becomes the longest day deja vued.

Crazy the amount of time wasted on watching the same and old movie over again, no matter how often it reruns on television, but certain flicks fit this modus operandi. It literally triggers something clinical, a Pavlovian response that cements my attention span sometimes just to relive what might be its punctum. Quite a bit to endure especially when one knows each plot verbatim. Such devotion just to see a particular scene or hear a specific line betrays an odd aesthetic character flaw indeed. But why rewatch Cool Hand Luke if not to hear "Ain't no man live can eat fiddy eggs" for the umpteenth time? Or sit patiently through the Natural just the see Redford, down 0-2 in the count, shatter the mythical Wonderboy before batboy Bobby "picks (him) a winner", the Savoy Special to launch the next pitch into rooftop lightstands, creating impromptu fireworks again? Not this gung ho sucker, for sure.

Like Billy Sol Hurok and Big Jim McBob said, "It blowed up real good."

Notes on a pissmire ant

Snatching the pebble in itself represents a continuation of Analects. Include another part to complete the tryptych that features trial by fire or tattooing via scarification. Then the tao of things learned from cultural tourism, gentrified as David Carradine softshoeing combat choreography, completes the tautology.

Thus achieving masterhood, the new series and the next logical step, reenacts manufactured rites of passage as peripatetic spiritualism. The male ideal orientalized as philosopher, glorified as warrior and hybridized as hapa takes literal form as performance through sculptural object. Out of action as it were that plainly caricatures tests of physical prowess and endurance, mental toughness and ingenuity from ancient pedagogical models. The mandarin tradition, though Aristotlean, repeats the same lesson now as the priest leaves no visible traces on the delicate rice paper.

Or has this sacred ritual now become Westernized? Does one accustomed to American excess fall victim to popular culture and devise other modernized, if not mechanized means to circumvent what used to measure strength and character?

Why not construct perhaps convoluted monkey bars that hover above the aformentioned site? Is it enough to contrast the rote educative process typical of the martial arts requiring the student to actually undergo this test discipline of skill?

Caught up... in between

Finally no more winding up the damn propeller every week. Time which skyrocketed itself into a dizzying orbit ran out of gas so that the laws of Newtonian physics can apply enough gravity for reentry. Just a few eyes left to dot and then the madness of the next stage of the next race beckons. But not awhile at least. Besides with a few monkey wrenches in the works behind the scenes, who knows what the final edit will look like?

Not that the mind or the body acclimated yet to the oxygen deprivation. Catching your breath is not an option under such compressed conditions. And when all the leg muscles cramp because sprinting uphill carrying a fifty pound load doubles the strain capacity, the remedy that moment is simply to choke back the tears and press forward. Do or die or something to that effect.

But what is the lesson learned? Be a boy scout and be prepared? Or that maybe reading IS fundamental? A clearer picture hopefully forms within the next thirty-six hours.

Remembering Barry White

The man probably arrived early yesterday. The angels in tribute folded back the satin sheets and heaven cooed in ecstasy.

So take off your brassierre, my dear, my darling I...can't get enough of your love, babe, never, never, ever let you go, and make your toenails curl.

Love remains unlimited.

Plebes on the prowl

Again things hold true to form, even as the new replaces the old. The faces may change but certain patterns still persist rarely deviating from the cliches. No matter what and predictably typical of very bad ensemble acting, the broadly-painted cast consists of the usual suspects as usual. A three-hour tour that began a fortnight ago except this latest sequel strands the skipper and Gilligan "plus the computer geek...the gothic chick...a southern belle, and the rest."

Not that this is necessarily a negative situation so much as a self-fulfilling prophecy gone awry. It is like slowly stripping away very aged wallpaper: just when you think the layer removed will reveal bare wall, inevitably what appears is only another and more obstinate layer. That pretty much describes the slow process of discovery to nurture, grow and coax creative approaches to heretofore worn ground. Old habits die hard so the trick is to open eyes, flooding the mental plain until fertile soil is drowned.

Which is why the way things go appropriately stammers any group into slack-jawed acquiesence. Love it or hate it, mesmerized or bored to nap, thought ballons do suddenly materialize.

Chivalry Lost

Funny the things recalled offhand when being told of something cataclysmic. How words spoken conjured up the Holy Grail, of Sir Robin storming the rampart to kill temptation is appropriately Pythonesque. Our gallant hero fighting onward in the name of all that is good -his chin firm, his progress steady, his arm strong. But waging battle deep into the wanton heart, the lascivious desire, the righteous sword of virtue does weaken. For the dragon to be slain is perfumed and partly clothed, moaning an ecstatic tongue. Eventually the pleasures of flesh swarm and overwhelm him and he falters. Who would think so valiant and true an individual could fall prey?

But of course he succumbs, constantly flirting with and tempting the fates as he does. Frailty of moral being is often susceptible to carnal lust especially when left alone to its own devices. Distance prevents accidents of intimacy. So much for the protection of forged armor.

Notes on Imitation of Life

Imitation of Life is an installation that dissects the popular racist schoolchildren rhyme, “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these” photographically and textually to comment on racial stereotyping. Based loosely on the Douglas Sirk melodrama of the same name, this work consists of two sets of twelve black and white photographs depicting mimicked exoticized Asian facial characteristics through sexual innuendo and accompanying text, framed excerpts in print researched from anthropological textbooks about taboo Asian cuisine, divided into four groups. Each group features the same Caucasian adult male, female, and young male child reenacting a single section of the rhyme. The textual passages are reedited to approximate a “fortune cookie saying” grammatical style associated with how Asians are perceived to speak. Viewed as a whole, these sections resemble the syntactical structure that forms a sort of “visual sentence” in conjunction with the actual food text. A similarly framed mirror and blank sheet of paper positioned on the opposite wall faces the main body of this piece.

What this work intends to project is a flux of language as visual information depicting pictorial image versus text per se as typographical element to reinforce prejudiced notions of perception. To see without hearing the rhyme refers to learning by rote, sometimes an oral tradition alluding to repeating gestures passed on from generation to culture to generation. This notion relates to how the food text centers on perceptions of how printed information becomes the accepted norm as a single version of the truth or represented truisms. Showing scientifically, or medically, supported statements to validate Asian cooking and eating habits within this work questions the whole idea of what is taboo food and consequently who determines what are the systems of standards used to judge acceptable from unacceptable. To perpetuate a negative stereotype is a guerrilla tactic to compare the equal absurdity in the racism of these particular images and text.

Superstitious

Today a younger Jamie Lee Curtis avoids the shower, fearful to repeat the cinematic precedent inflicted by Hitchcockian neurosis. Or does she? Funny how the apple (or peach in this case) falls close to the tree. Some like it hermaphrodite hot as it were but enough so that dyslexia inverts the thirty first into yet another series of neverending sequels. Does evil abound as a hockey mask? What about those lucky charms? Silly rabbit, magic tricks are for kids, you know. But Donald Pleasance no longer blinded after his great escape chases after Jason mistakingly instead. So what else can triskaidekophobics dread?

"Mister Sandman, bring me a dream...make him the best that I've ever seen.." And make sure he wears a horseshoe especially.

Meat Country, baby

Carnivores delight, because first to the table and last to leave aptly describes the gluttony of meat ingested over an open flame. Seasoned and barbequed, roasted and pulled, how delectable the multitudinous smells of swine slowly cooked, a succulent red apple stuffed in its mouth. Indeed the other white meat if you will culturally suits those who suck the tendon and cartilage clean off the bone. Life, after all, is a bowl of pork chops.

Or the flowing juices of two half-pound patties of ground beef grilled "one-one thousand, two-one thousand, flip" for that charred though tartar texture. Fear not the sight of raw, red blood for it puts hair on the chest and does the soul comfort.

As the wise broadcaster is wont to say, "Some just as good, none better..." So garcon, garcon...(snapping fingers)...more french fries for this table! And how brilliant is it to use Coke to marinate as well as tenderize otherwise tough short ribs.

Spring cleaning

Come on in, Mister Clean. Polish your shaven bald head shiny as can be and roll up those short tee shirt sleeves. The floors, the doors, even windows ought to gleam a fresh lemon scent. And faster than you can say disinfectant, the whole dirty place is spotless, enough to make Gomer proudly shazam.

Is there a soother calm than the quiet whir of an Electrolux canister vacuum? Or a purer sound than the effervescent fizz of scrubbing bathroom surface foam? Maybe just maybe the fat lady not only sings but mops on her knees sans brush or sponge using good, old-fashioned elbow grease. And not a trace of fine dust remains.

God bless the spic-and-span for doing such a top job.

Reminiscing the Ides of May, 1988

"Don't know why there are clouds up in the sky, stormy weather.."

It happened as if in a blink of an eye. A slight blip, no more than a fraction but significant enough to raise eyebrows. Then the covenant so sacred disintegrated into black.

Looking back, mark your calendar one day before the anniversary of what might have been fifteen years. A funny thing happened on the way to the forum. That afternoon, as Cyndi Lauper and her entourage stood outside across from the tavern at Catalpa and Broadway, the gods protested. And the sky belched, dark clouds shaped like fluffy hearts hurled many lightning bolts and in sympathy, car alarms wailed. Such a gesture in itself would foretell of the state of things to come. True, the heavens finally cooperated, casting bright afternoon sunshine afterwards, but the mechanism to turn the shrew into Cleopatra stabbed poor Mark Anthony in the back eight or nine times. Even Helga presciently counseled caution. Who knew then basking in the stark evening glow with tribesmen yelping a twirling cymballed hankerchief and twenty dollar bills wafting above our heads and Murderer's Row posing in tuxedos that a pair of rose-colored glasses could shatter so easily? Really so who is afraid of Virginia Wolf?

Count the wounded maybe.

On the vagaries of frontrunning

"An ephedra cocktail to perk the blues away, Your Highness?"
"But of course..."

Again king for the day, though sadly as is the modus operandi of any horsehide squad so managed, now or about a month and a half into the new season is when my boys of spring usually push forward and expectedly occupy the driver's seat momentarily. Alas the dog days of summer ahead will see fit to wilt this momentum and the hope sprung eternal from smoke and mirrors inevitably clears. And the cold, dark cellar beckons its dank claim as Lola sings her song.

This is such a cruel, cruel game.

Slaughter rule in effect

Say it ain't so, Joe. The latest score shows the home team down by a huge margin.

Where is the supposedly potent run support? Not once out of their own volition in any situation does the bench remotely clear even when someone charges the mound. Forget about the third base coach who gives the green light, windmilling his right arm only to get bushwhacked from behind. Just count your money and bask in your glory. Typical bad play and typical lack of effort deriving from poor fundamentals, groundless execution and pure indifference. So why jump through the hoops without any reciprocation, petty as it may seem? Nothing rips a team apart faster than bad chemistry.

Go into the stands for a foul ball at your own risk.

"You're so vain..."

Toot your own horn and hear the off-key notes. It is but narcissistic karaoke sung to masturbate wee shortcomings. Those with better-trained and well-practiced lips who know how to tongue the rim do so expertly without breathing in the funk. And that makes the world go around every twenty-four hours uninterrupted by any commercials. Advertising works but just what is being sold depends on the star power of the spokesperson, not the product itself. Just smile those pearly whites, pucker up and wax interminable about your best subject since study hall and/or lunch. A sucker is born every minute who will buy sight unseen.

Behind-the-scenes technicians need not apply. Second, third and even fourth chair is all that can be hoped for. As former Minnesota Viking fullback Leroy Hoard philosophized, "If you need one yard, I'll get you three; if you need five yards, I'll get you three."

In Queue

The hare versus the tortoise and finally the Road Runner loses. Slow and steady is just that, only slower and steadier. Speed burns especially oil viscosity which predictably causes damage to any metabolic engine. So is fifteen minutes an arbitrary measurement related only to celebrity? Can it not also serve as a quarter slice of time to indicate efficiency? What consumed upwards to one to oftentimes two or three hours now is accelerated to the great appreciation of those quirks of nature defying odds with beginner's luck.

The onerous monolith that is the red tape central turned over a new leaf, instituting modern technology to better herd the little doggies along. The result depending on distance from the crowded middle moves supersonic fast. So much so that windows blew out from Mach three breaking. So call me Roger Bannister because the subhour pace is shattered. And by an inhuman margin smacking of Bob Beamon in Mexico City, too. An incredible and incredulous feat.

But black stirrup hose pulled below the calf plus black cleats creates the illusion of hauling a trailer around third. The wheels spin but fourth gear is mainly for power and not at all for speed. So what accounts for the new world record?

T.S. Eliot notwithstanding...

And so ends the cruelest of all months because when it rains, it pours.

Not a fine misty drizzle, mind you, but a good gracious, honest-to-God torrential downpour. The kind that uproots Kansas clapboard farmhouses and whirl them around into the land of Frank Baum. With things falling out of the sky and people scattered about, running for dear life. Even the Hamilton girls, Edith and Margaret, flee, unsure whether their previous stations grant both or the other immunity.

Though it did begin tamely, purring like a kitten asleep at first. That might well explain its eventual fury.

This Old House, again

A very long list of things to do suddenly materialized out of nowhere. Case in point is the recurring nightmare of the burst pipe. Last winter despite observing protocol to bleed the outdoor water lines as preventive maintenance, a leak sprung anyway, gushing forth a frozen pond. It seems to happen biannually without fail. Luckily this time no flood damage to speak of. The ice rink finally did thaw and eddied down the drainpipe harmlessly enough. Only the snapped-off spigot remains to bear witness. Galvanized steel is surely suseptible to something so innocuous as cold weather.

So this old house is under repair again.

First order of business then involves rerouting. Careful analysis of the problem reveals a flaw in Kansei engineering. Extraneous and highly vulnerable pipes extend extraneously from point of egress to an unimpeded corner in typical westernized design. To rectify poor interior architecture, simply realigning existing elbows to allow for direct access eliminates the need altogether of the exposed plumbing. Hopefully this ten-cent solution will solve future headaches.

Naturally all this work just for the sake of sprinkling the reseeded lawn because green matters. One day raking dead grass and leaves, pruning dead branches and aerating dead topsoil only reinforces this suburban fixation. Speaking of which, if the grass up front fails to grow, removing the hardened limestone-mixed dirt might soften the turf to permit the seed to take.

Then comes the garage, a bane hexing form following function. Completely gutterless with holes in the roof, this affront to backyard aesthetics is off-plumb by three inches. A temporary fix is to patch or reshingle the top and attach a front rail with flanking downspouts for proper drainage. Maybe even a new coat of paint. Inside requires additional shelving and hooks to increase the storage space and free up the floor which could also be repainted.

And that is only the outside.

Things to do, again

Next comes reorganization and documentation. Perhaps even an unanticipated return to fiction. All those loose, incomplete stories require an ending or at the very least another paragraph or two. Then after that is renovating the look of what now exists online. It needs to function according to Hoyle in keeping with a certain aesthetic that bespeaks a signature design sense. Finally replant the lawn. Repair those sickly brown patches and gaping bare spots.

A day that will live in infamy.

So it ends, wiped completely out. And those left standing do so quite shell-shocked, stunned by the perfunctory speed of the action. Well-planned but coarsely executed, the chain of command broke ranks and surrendered. With nary the token last stand. See the white of their eyes, sound retreat and turn tail real fast helter skelter. Led straight into an ambush, one by one, the comrades-in-arms fall, mowed down like sacrificial lambs. Suddenly white flags aflutter, held high by the mighty officers-in-charge trailing behind.

The spineless often survive at the luxury of the true and brave.

Notes straight out of right field descriptively

Straight out of right field encased and alternately striped. A wall of flood lights blindly illuminate twin vertical bands repeated times twelve. Enter an interior world meant to exist outside, a metaphorical place not unlike the secret garden. What magical things might lie ahead, if not behind, entrances the curiosity...

Notes straight out of right field

An expanse of woven greenery ripples concentrically outward like a pixelated sea of diamonds or squares abutted in tiled pattern. Or dark olive waves alternated with lime leaves of grass. But unnaturally as if CAD-drawn and chemically sprayed.

Dread Scott on the floor sits a platformed structure, a Jasper Johns ziggurat if you will in memoriam of Old Glory. Off the wall and four times the actual scale, its height stands maybe waist level allowing for right-angled circumnavigation. Outside a sign conceptually warns to keep off the lawn.

Underneath rises the rising sun.

Malady, of epidemic proportions

Something about March really maddens. First the buzzer sounds not once but invariably and inevitably way too often. Followed by a dark horse whinnying. A persistent noise that signals an interstice disrupting the natural syntax of to and fro. Even time falls apart, remeasured by the hour into fifteen minute halves. Suddenly the nation transfixes on those long young limbs doing a very big dance. But who is to say who remains an ugly duckling and who becomes the beautiful swan. Yet, in spite of Eliot, fanatics do come and go speaking not of Michaelango but his elbow.

And in a blink of the eye that very cruel month arrives.

Another Grace Kelly

Finally a biography worth its weight in salt. Hollywood, its usual culture of narcissism and fictionalized history rebuked to recount how Queen Noor of Jordan came to be. Another Cinderella story about an American blonde who marries a foreign king, typical fairy tale stuff except for the blunt timing of the current war.

Her world centers on a leap of faith, for love which begat her conversion by law to Islam. It is about a charmed life absent of the trivialized, intent on sincere altruism and committed to honest causes. The twenty and some years of being in the public eye which mirrored the uncertain and unstable times of a holy land where so much blood has been spilled, bore witness to, if not shaped, latter twentieth century history. Real substantive material instead of the fluff of manufactured Warholian celebrity afflicting popular cultural consciousness.

No wonder that her adopted countrymen so adore and treasure their queen, wife of the beloved and belated king and the mother of the Crown Prince.

Upon visiting the Milwaukee Art Museum

To see it is divine, poised as if awaiting christening. Indeed two years after the fact and HAL does speak very loud and clear. No postpunk entropy, no nuclear winterland, no dire visions of machine subjugating man, only good old-fashioned modernism, science fiction to construct a better tomorrow. Immediately any delusional Orwellian dystopia fades.

It is a magnificently futuristic structure, this winged ship built of glass and steel, antiseptically white like sand-blown whale bone. Yet as monument to the sea, or specifically the lake, nothing alien or unnatural can be discerned from its presence, its being. Ready to set sail, ready to soar, it seems to say, because our mission is to honor, secure and defend that which will come. And the power of its radial geometry only reiterates its symmetry.

Inside the belly of the architect though runs elongated floating white spaces, distorted fisheye-lensed corridors, impossibly curving away to unknown vanishing points. Only the constant intervals of the concrete rib cage supporting these marbled veins offer any sort of three-point perpective. Otherwise travellers lose bearing, any sense of directional logic. Still a comfortable warmth borne of deja vu, forged by the forbidden planet emanates from the cool precision and sterility that comprises its barren skeleton.

Tarkovsky never dreamt of such a pedestrian place where bonneted attendants walk upside down on the ceiling in gravity boots, where abstract purity collides with figurative reality, where right angles bend anthropomorphically.

Notes almost straight out of right field

Just covering the floor in itself changes the space. So is it overkill to include the walls as well? If so, then minimize. Wainscot walls partway to manufacture fake horizon line.

Or extend long runner from entryway to door. Place strike zone parallel to white foul line.

Aboard a Sinking Ship

The importance of timing is ironic. Especially given how a certain anxiety permeates the state of which things now exist. First a subtle but somewhat innocuous leak that inexorably gushes buckets full followed by the proverbial geyser. So it does pour when it rains and with cats and dogs too. But even as department heads push the panic button repeatedly, no amount of magic can avert the inevitable pink slips. Such happens hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly only the collateral damage inflicts a deeper psychic wound. Lame ducks wittingly or not abound.

Useless talk of inverted pyramids to complicate rather simple strategies of tried and true known quantities temporarily buoys the punctured dinghy only long enough for all hands on deck to abandon ship. Consequently the rudderless skipper dependent on a proliferation of extraneous prerequisites paddles single-oared around in circles. His lieutenants obviously failed: one from obsessive-compulsive disorder, the other of caveat emptor.

Never mind the ramifications of not shooting a dying horse on the ground. At least our Custer will die with his shining patent black leather boots on. Live and let live to a nauseatingly indifferent conclusion, he pronounces. Crying wolf over so little a running balance is creative accounting. Think the bluff of Enron and Sherman marches on, burning torch aflame.

And April Fool's Day surprises the jester and his court. Out of the blue, blue left field comes an avenging angel in the guise of a second chance. For the evicted executive surreptiously breaks union picket lines. Unbeknownst even to the annointed, another game is afoot. Offer him a deal not to be refused. Switch places officially and lead the apostate astray. Once again it is a wonderful life.

A bell rings.

Notes on mixed media

Something about the nature of chop suey evokes a paradigm for mixed media. The slicing and dicing of disparate material all hodgepodged together as if tossed around like a caesar salad is et tu, Kienholz by way of Jasper Johns.

Notes straight from right field (for Ichiro)

The thrill of the grass smells suspiciously artificial. From wall to floor to wall completely covered. Astroturfed false walls hold smaller panels which mimic hung canvas tilted off center like cheap diamonds. Dotting the verdant interior are pink flamingoes perched next to four white polyurethene lawn chairs plus (or minus) patio table on top of which might sit an old portable color Zenith. Two huge Bose speakers blare the 1812 Overture complete with exploding fireworks.

A panoramic photograph of a Caspar Friedrichish landscape encased in a blond wood frame circumnavigates the whole of the space. On the television Yan Can Cook dices bok choy for a chicken stir fry.

Plumbing the Depths

A dent finally repaired. The slow trickle rediverted and sealed. Three crenallated plastic knobs, now obsolete, morphed to become a sleek chrome handle. Soon the open wounds will heal as plaster bandages cure the gaping holes that rob any sense of wholeness. And the disquiet of discontinuity which lingered like a cancerous growth retreats momentarily. It is an ongoing process this worry.

Upon visiting Sin City

Christmas in Vegas sounded like a bad Hollywood comedy starring Hugh Grant and whoever the latest WB Television Network ingenue might be. It turned out to be both exactly that and something otherwise. Sort of Broadway Boogie Woogie meets Bright Lights, Big City. (Piet Mondrian chumming with Jay McInerney?) The bombastic neon explosion along the Strip IS the cascading electric canyon of grandiose American sublime as advertised. Why else would someone no less than Dave Hickey champion its formalism?

But the expected kitsch never materialized as the anticipated irony. Somehow the excessive and overblown theatricality of the "big show" works as ordinary normalcy. No escapism or fantasy disguised as healthy simulacra to disorient, no agape awe of Disney World proportions, this is unexpurgated, unadulterated "real life" now.

Analect (stone, water and glass)

Or a laconic exercise implied through absence, minimalist cause and effect as Confucian saying.

Look above.

First, an off-white curtained rectangle. Next, a disembodied hand grasping a gray stone appears. Seconds pass before the fingers open and the stone drops down out of sight.

On the ground at the same time is a clear glass of water, half-filled or half-empty, in wait.

Notes on Yellow Face

His invention, my ghost, by Earl Derr Biggers roams just off-camera in Technicolor or even digitalized black and white. It is a postmodern detective story to find the other self, a reflection and refraction enveloped in smoky sfumato through greasy plate glass windows. Locate him seated in the red vinyl booth under the omnipresent portrait of Mao Tse Tung. Or is he behind the butcher block cleaving roast pork and duck?

Notes on a Proposed Model for an Orientalist way of life

Green lantern, red lantern? Or shiny mirrored lantern? Not a disco ball of mirrored tiles but a slick, reflective surface akin to Jeff Koons superficial glean. Maybe a DeStijl lantern of LeCorbusierian proportions?

Form shirks fashion, Or Ray versus Hirst

Charles Ray is the Wilbur Snyder (Wrestler with a Thousand Moves) of the art world, a thinking man’s artist. Smart without being smarmy or condescending. To look at the underrated work of Charles Ray is to wonder about perception as art, or the art of perception, what the things being looked at are. His approach toward making art reworks the familiar subject matter which comprises the formal vocabulary of art: the cube, the circle, the line, the human body, etc. As in Rotating Circle or Ink Line, Ray transforms something regarded as two-dimensional in nature into sculptural objects. A circle on a wall reveals itself to be a spinning surface driven by a hidden motor, or a line suspended from ceiling to floor is actually ink being spilled to be pumped back in an endless cycle. He tweaks these to question the popular conventions of material related to art in general, concepts taken for granted. His playful wit refers to the history of art and its current “isms” without being too obtuse. Somehow the hackneyed formal issues become reinvigorated through his natural curiosity because he simply adds to the continuing dialogue of what the conversation seems to be at the time.

The opposite happens looking at Damien Hirst. To look at his work is to feel cheated intellectually. What you see is what you get, the spectacle of the shock of the new (Bobby Hughes, where are you now, baby?). Indeed, the grandeur of his work hinges on the sensation of the visual experience that alludes to something conceptual. His sliced and diced animals seem to be a poor man’s Jeff Koons as he sort of pays lip service to recent art history (mainly Pop Art or its cousin NeoPop). The sarcasm of butchery as taxidermy in this work becomes a remnant of the 80’s sense of style over content. The artist repeats himself rather reinvestigates ideas to wring out a theme lamely as with his huge ashtray piece. An unctuous feeling occurs to know his persona is featured in Vogue magazine trumpeting the man as personality over his work.

Ode to Cremaster Five

Cremaster 5
is opera, myth, epic, video

a West Prague Side Story in five parts
by Matthew Barney disrobed and shackled
as Magician (Houdini? Or Death?) as Diva
scaling a proscenium beanstalkish vine like ova ascending the Fallopian tubes and as Giant, Satyrlike creature bourne of Jacobin pigeons

And the return of her Ursula Andress, she who would be Natalie Wood nee Maria's fake soprano's kiss.

His vision in search of origin, of creation or birth and rebirth as baroque copulation becomes her voice, a new species from an asexual process, another rite of passage in his continuing cycle of new gender and new life.

Daylight Savings Time

To spring back and fall forward or vice versa is as a misquote the question. Harry Boris a long time ago suppositioned that walking, scientifically speaking, is simply a matter of controlled falling. This in itself constituted enough material for Peter Land to videotape as a body of work pertaining to how outside forces affect the body. But midway through a fall, descent is frozen as if the hand of God interceded. The expectant and resultant onomatopoeia to conclude said action then becomes a gerund suspended as syntactical pause. Or a burp if you will signalling finally the halfway point. Somehow to indicate time moving ahead or backward as a physical pratfall appropriately encapsulates kinetic theory as perhaps something filmic.

So it seems that Eadweard Muybridge guides my current path, however circuitous its route may be, one frame at a time. At last count, only fifty or so frames remain.

Notes on chinoiserie

First things first is to tie up loose ends literally. Too many unresolved ideas and too many dusty objects lounging about just sit unattended, ignored or forgotten in the proverbial waiting room too exhausted or too injured to glumly stare back. But the inexorable march does happen and finally the mountain stops because Mohammed uttered Simon says.

That said, maybe continue dissecting the lariated stool legs into digestable drumstick portions just by way of stretching out the form. Its minimalism is oddly enough too empty and requires multiplicity. To julienne further divides and doubles, triples if not quadruples that which already exists. Not a bad idea considering that gnawing feeling of this piece being unfinished or rethought.

But do check off repairing the broken cleaved segments because stick it with a fork, it is done. Prepackaged wood dowels predrilled exactingly allowed for the disconnected sections to be glued and biscuited for added strength. Designing a reusable crate for freight of said work, though, is another story.

And what of the hexagonal lamp carcasses?

Notes on the art of the cut

Enter the dragon, part two

Three slashes across the canvas surface to emulate and reference Lucio Fontana. Puckered slits perhaps bleeding crimson or Francis Bacon dripping reflected by tiled mirrors as diptych. Or curved extended plane. Or mismatched screen, each panel with a possible total of ten lengths in descending order, tilted to snake out.

Notes on Endless Column, Blue and White Variation

Joseph Heller wrote sometimes a great notion.

Which amounts to as good an explanation as any for regurgitating Constantin Brancusi as a new series of work. Like Bruce Nauman whose affinity for puns translated into photographic exercises as text, substitute cultural context to remake Bird in Space or At the Beginning of the World. Perhaps outcome is manifest sculpturally through aforementioned orientalia. What began as paraphrasing with blue variation of the Endless Column via porcelain rice bowls begs a complete sentence.

A fuller picture to define this investigation needs to be developed.

Upon traveling to British Columbia

In the course of very long respites, the urge or obsession to record simply subsides as far as very long respites go. Distractions naturally occur. Like travel abroad from within domestic borders. But let me backtrack first.

The onerous prospect of facing a seven day work week unabated from Labor Day until just before Christmas proved a demoralizing realization. Enough so to prompt a preemptive strike as a means to compensate. One week or five days plus the weekend away in exchange for one hundred and five consecutive times of punching the clock is sure enough Luddite arithmetic, but given the creative accounting philosophies affecting current economics, who is to say otherwise.

And so explains somewhat the rather conspicuous layoff. Revivification meant time spent on the Sea to Sky Highway roaming the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia in a rented Buick Grand Marquis replete with luxurious leather upholstery and powered doohickies to satisfy even the most discriminating of retired senior citizens. On the road minus Keroauc retracing in fact some of his footsteps unintentionally certainly defined a sense of place as inhabited by a prior and palpable history. To look at locales witnessed by the eyes of those countless before us fits what Roland Barthes espoused in Camera Lucida of a photograph of Napoleon taken by his sibling. The awe he held of sharing the same perceptual "space" if you will that "stared into those eyes" failed to breathe the intense revelation to perplexed colleagues when the French philosopher recounted this experience.

The purely visual is sometimes hard to translate.

Contextualizing Identity through Popular Culture as Performance, Video and Installation

Kabuki or Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Charlie Chan or Gladys Knight and the Pips? And which is stronger, a rock or water? To be Asian or to be American is the ontological question. Or is the question, more appropriately, to be somewhere in between, straddling the proverbial fence?

What all of these disparate questions seem to share in common relates to combining old ideas heretofore considered as individual projects that over the course of much time and labored thought dovetailed into a concept for a larger new piece. Probably as a result, this revelation, this change in direction represents an attempt on my part to break from a predictable aesthetic often associated with a conceptual albeit rigid linearity characteristic of previous work.

The summer term began with four ideas for new works planted deeply in my mind as definitive projects to execute: growing a lawn indoors, Kabukized Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a portrait of the artist as a Pip, and finally, the parable of the Stone versus Water as metaphor of the difference in Eastern and Western attitudes toward life and living. Each was intended to be a separate work. But something quite unexpected happened during the course of concurrently conceptualizing how to visualize these notions into actual work: each idea began to relate to each other in ambiguous terms under my continued scrutiny. This prompted more questions of pinpointing the exact nature how these projects linked. What about being a Pip refers to Kabuki? How does the aforementioned parable relate to indoor lawn maintenance?

Thus begins the dialogue that transforms these distinct questions from becoming the usual series of work. To address these additional questions, determine why and identify the elusive quality of the relationships between each idea requires a strategy of dissection and deconstruction through research and more analysis. To do this I write. Often the mental approach of the physical action of writing notes (my way of sketching out an idea without actually drawing) reveals hidden aspects of the idea of a new piece itself. This process disciplines how a concept evolves usually from a one-liner into something more layered. Mostly, the result is a synthesis of stream-of-conscious proselytizing and apriori logical polemics, all of which is culled from a variety of fictional and nonfictional readings. The following offers a summary of this writing process/artistic methodology:

Within a demarcated, confined space- probably indoors, roll out preplanted grass rectangles to form maybe fifteen by fifteen yard square area on top of a three-inch deep wooden box platform built to accommodate packed soil for lawn growth and planting. Interior site location is dependent on natural light source accessibility, if not availability, as photosynthesis will allow grass to root and grow on a regular basis. Proximity to sink only facilitates irrigation, as watering the lawn by connecting a hose to a facet is certainly preferable to sloshing around using the labor-intensive water bucket brigade method of running back and forth to water grass.

bell hooks, in discussing how Malcolm X changed, transformed his misogynistic political views in her book Outlaw Cultures touches upon the subject of a white supremacist internalized mindset of preprogrammed colonization. One is affected as a person of color in their perception of the dominant culture, whitewashing by natural instinct or edict, all other colors in race. The "subliminal" lesson is that the white (Americanized or Europeanized) way of life is supposed to "civilize" indigenous, inferior (or unchristian) cultures. The term "civilization", interestingly enough, is euphemism for the righteousness of the "white man" to subvert and annihilate that which is opposite to it or considered wild or formless. An appropriate analogy as a new work to investigate this idea might involve the lawn and its maintenance, specifically, its manicure.

Growing a lawn indoors in order to mow it weekly pertains to a particular conditioned state of mind that permeates through acculturation from institutionalized systems or the powers that be, in an insidious manner, how one becomes saturated and brainwashed to value white Eurocentric ways of seeing. In simpler terms, to be All-American, within a minority context, is to assume a white guise; some might say to "sell out" or "buy in". No matter how one maintains their cultural roots and integrity, what we learn from Eurocentrically written history books eventually manipulates the subconscious into adopting the same prejudiced criteria to judge or perceive what is good or bad. The set of standards becomes slightly skewed, altered to reflect white majority mainstream tastes: white is beautiful and black as well as other colors ugly; God (Christian monotheism) supreme over alternative religions and belief systems. The mission, which began to convert other nonchristian cultures, is strangely successful in secular terms. European society through cultural imperialism determines the perceptual agenda for other Third World countries to modernize their industrialization efforts to computer age technology in order to keep pace and not lag behind. The implication of which is related to the notion that cultural failure equals cultural inferiority (Japan is the exception to a certain degree as Post-World War Two restrictions precluded this island nation from any significant military buildup. The subsequent American presence in varied forms influenced the Japanese psyche to abide by, adapt, and reinvent their sense of nationalism as a means to reclaim themselves as a world power, an economic giant based on technological leadership).

Why are Americans obsessed with manicured lawns? Is it coincidental the relationship of prosperity, wealth is associated with traditional American values e.g. the All-American Dream of house and the Norman Rockwell white picket fence surrounding and protecting the perfectly precious front and back lawns? But the majority (White) of Americans cut grass, mow lawns as a sign of, to reflect their culturally economic nobless oblige. Even people of color follow suit, infected by similar disease. Blindly assimilating the worse aggressive traits of these cultural fascists lording over entire ethnic communities, sometimes whole ways of living oftentimes hundreds of generations old become lost, thrown away like detritus in favor of, or in deference to achieving the glory of the American Dream.

All of which only raises more questions to wrestle with such as how am I affected by these cultural and historical forces? Is my compulsion to mow a lawn related only to the loose metaphor of the colonizational effects on my person? Does cutting grass every week mean that I am an unwitting victim or willing participant in this cycle? And how is this conveyed within the context of the work?

Include as documentation videotape of the artist mowing the lawn, or another lawn outdoors, every week. Quality of image determines whether videotape is to be projected on the wall or played back on a monitor. Installation as video projection limits how the work is presented only in darkened spaces. Visually, the projection extends into the actual lawn edge, traversing boundaries between fictive (two-dimensional) and nonfictive (three-dimensional). Technical restrictions of media, of projection is problematic as interior space, in order to project video image optimally, ordinarily must be darkened to an almost pitch-black setting that is contrary to stated lighting conditions ideally suited to nurture lawn growth. If it is impossible to reconcile the foreseeable lighting dilemma, then priority is primarily to focus on the lawn first, or perhaps rethink work to divide the installation into two separate rooms by bifurcating the space into a well-lit lawn area or greenhouse and the darkened video space. The whole point of the lawn image in the video is to satisfy the compulsion on my part to cut it.

Also related to this main issue of identity, or the perception of identity and how it is controlled, is another idea for another work to restage the cult classic gore movie Texas Chainsaw Massacre as Kabuki theater. In-depth research as well as repeated viewing suggests strong comparisons between the Japanese theatrical form and the horror flick genre especially shared characteristics such as styled makeup and melodramatic movements that revolve mostly around tales of revenge.

Begin storyboard work in order to shoot raw video footage for respective lawn, Kabuki, and Gladys Knight pieces. Tighten conceptually the relationship between each work as larger whole. Familiarization of overall plotline of movie in question facilitates derivation of basic idea for edit. Script should last no more than a half-hour to test run for ironing out any kinks.

The horror film genre replicates its literary antecedent solely as cautionary morality plays pitting man against himself; his metaphysical shadow if you will, susceptible to evil and its abysmal pitfalls. Pure goodness of soul usually triumphs over satanic evil, but in contemporary society, such extremes in character are much too simplistic an answer. Evil manifests itself in multivaried, complex forms too complicated to explain in just purely religious or philosophical terms. Scientific or psychological or even supernatural or extraterrestrial reasons are also part of the larger puzzle that is the human perception of belief systems enacted to govern human intellectual and spiritual concerns. Man institutes certain moral safeguards in place to prevent disorder, chaos (as with the lawn project analogy of something wild disrupting a man-made sense of natural order). Life in Judeo-Christian terms is a constant test of oneself resisting sin and maintaining a gospel of observing God's edicts so as to enter heaven for everlasting salvation. In Eastern (most Asian) societies, an inherent understanding related to Eastern thought and religion exists of a natural balance, the yin and yang, that is a continuous battle between light and dark, of opposites. How to express the Western (in most cases, Hollywood) influence on Eastern culture in this work refers not only to the cultural manifest destiny and how it affects problems of acculturation but also to the reappropriation of imagery, iconography borrowed in a filmic context.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the perfect model to act as a symbol of American mass consumption. It is a story of a serial-killing family hell-bent on murdering victims out of a personality-possibly mental-disorder, frightening viewers disgusted by psychotic hacking of the human body in gruesome slaughterhouse fashion (as if to say human life is nothing more than a slab of meat one eats). It is also a metaphor for the perceived American penchant to cannibalize other cultures. Using a mechanized machine to cut up and off limbs to kill certainly illustrates a dichotomy of the American psyche: everyone understandably reacts in horror and then, surprisingly, in fascination. Herein lies the contradiction of mass public character that one becomes sick initially, but then returns to gape, bloodthirsty. Is the capacity for violence, as some critics say, the result of media pandering to the lowest common denominator that creates distance, an eventual emotional detachment from reality? Is the actual line blurred between what and how often one sees a certain event or thing and the event or thing itself?

But the primary question remains, how does adapting Texas Chainsaw Massacre address the cross-cultural issues of identity that speaks of my own voice? What is the conceptual point to doing this? And is what is being said simply a one-dimensional reading to subvert the cultural context of this film with that of another?

Instead of verbatim adaptation of the film, the work of performance and installation artist Paul McCarthy can serve as a model to offer ideas about how a different artist treats similar subject matter. When Drea Howenstein asked my interest in his work, specifically, what about his art captures in content that which relates to my current projects on hand, what stood out strikingly is the palpable sense of visceral danger his pieces project. One feels uncomfortable, almost nauseous looking at what he does almost as if his intent, somewhat innocuous, sometimes docile, is to expose the hidden, nascent violence present in any simple act or thing in American contemporary society as the viewer walks away unsure of whether to laugh or be scared. This ambiguity essential in successful work compels the viewer to wonder about its tongue-in-cheek quality, to impugn if the outward skin, appearance is the actual representation of its meat and bones, if you will. Most of what McCarthy stages involves characters, beings of popular culture and its various guises, costumed as theatrical cartoons straight from Hollywood movies and television who the artist transforms through scripted performance to act out tasks or movements that betray the potential to mutilate and inflict harm. His work overtly references the horror film genre in its content as well as traditional Japanese Theater in ritualistic-like movement. McCarthy in these performances bespeaks a stylized fictive violence that seems detached and without a moral conscience typical of modern Western society. Because of prolonged, excessive bombardment to daily instances of acts of horrific violence, viewers become blasé to the cannibalization of human social interaction. Such can be said of Kabuki theater with its tales of wronged figures seeking justice, oftentimes victims of human frailty or moral flaws, fighting each other in the tragedy of life for honor, glory, or revenge. It becomes symbolic as a useful tool for McCarthy to ritualize nondescript menial action performed to imply potential violence that is male testosterone in nature. Men or caricatures of male (sometimes boyish) popular cultural iconography suffer from "Whose dick is bigger? Mine is so prove it or I'll beat you up" syndrome according to Paul McCarthy.

To ritualize as Asian something very American especially in Warholian popular culture, such as what Texas Chainsaw Massacre represents requires reevaluative editing. One needs to dissect the cinematic structure of this film within a political and cultural studies context. Can a madman family of characters be viewed as less than evil or mundane, diffused of a charged stereotype through a spiritually ritual process?

Slaughtering strangers, "other" people as livestock to barbecue in the movie also relates to the use of foodstuff as prop present in McCarthy's work. The cannibalism in this movie is a sardonic, very black comment on the dog-eat-dog (or forgive the pun, man-eat-man) nature of American popular culture as literally man consumes his neighbor to satiate his hunger to conquer things unknown and foreign to him. Most people equate eating human flesh as a savage, atavistic act so barbarian as to cause intense repulsion.

The violence that is a central part of the action in Texas Chainsaw Massacre is implicitly mythologized in Asian cinema (and theater). Both possess a poetic violent beauty as stylized action scenes symbolically also refers to a patriarchal order, a male code of who is in charge and in control. Strangers, a group of outsiders, then, represent a dual role of foreigner, an immigrant (illegal alien) or a traveler (tourist). These newcomers confront either the inchoate dominant culture intent on "consuming" i.e., cannibalizing everyone from without the community (a cinematic metaphor for acculturation and assimilation of minority groups) or the "Ugly American" sightseeing new, strange places simply to amass souvenirs in favor of learning about the indigenous people and their culture. Texas Chainsaw Massacre iterates the American (Western) belief that places dissimilar to the idea of industrialized and urbanized civilization as being backwards, without Christian regard to the precious value of human life.

The lesson to be learned from Texas Chainsaw Massacre involves a xenophobia prevalent in how newcomers strain to feel welcome, to become accepted as part of the community without losing their identity. To be symbolically and also literally slaughtered so as to be cooked in the so-called "melting pot" for dinner is an scathing indictment by director Tobe Hooper about how Americans treat cultural politics in general.

Recreating what McCarthy so acutely alludes to in his work which includes the topic of unnatural food for consumption, the whole eating process might be perceived as copycating except that this newer project illustrates a continuity of ideas in relation to the taboo cuisine theme in my previous work. It is understandable to feel a sense of duplication and even plagiarism in exploring ideas some other better-known artist monopolizes as their particular forte. However, both of these concepts deal with touchy subjects open to a cultural-specific interpretation. Utilization of an Asian aesthetic, though, both decenters and offsets the Western hegemony of a singular morality imposed on a colonized culture, hybrid in nature as a result of media-related longing to Americanize.

Also the issue of performance as theatricality is another formalistic aspect of McCarthy's work that influenced the incorporation of scripted movement and a soundtrack into this synthesized work. But the inclusion of an audio component specifically derives from another idea involving Gladys Knight and the Pips. The original concept was to scan photographs of myself into the background of the actual Gladys Knight and the Pips record album covers. The choice to appropriate or "sample" this particular popular African American rhythm and blues singer and her backup vocals mainly deals with the group dynamic of a trio of male singers providing vocal support to the featured lead female voice. Thus, this project satisfies my lifelong desire to be a Pip, to be onstage but several feet in the background, part of the support structure. It is an apt metaphor to illustrate an Asian penchant of avoiding the spotlight, of preferring to be behind the scenes: marginalizing the marginalized from the background into the foreground. I would literally replace one of the Pips or represent myself as a "lost Pip".

But why the decision to incorporate the Pips as a crucial piece to this larger entity relates to their carefully choreographed dance steps synchronized, in harmony, with their harmonizing. Viewers often associate dance as ritualized movement in response to music. This fit the analogy intended to express that one can see a comparison as well as a difference in the regulated reactions to a structured system. What I learn from McCarthy is the nonspecificity of contemporizing something. Of importance is the absurdity and relevance of this observation. Any act or thing can be rendered silly; since when this occurs, its meaning shifts to a broader scale. It allows for the application of different codings. The universalization that takes effect expands the sociopolitical and historical layers to be read from the collision of cultures. Also not lost is the irony of employing another oppressed minority as role model for the other to emulate since their histories in the United States often parallel in terms of discrimination.

Possibly feature a two person cast. Protagonist enters staged setting in mock Kabuki costume, perhaps a ceremonial kimono that is stripped off to don a white linen suit reminiscent of what Charlie Chan wears. Or maybe the performer comes onstage already garbed in the white linen suit and prostrates beside an altar-like structure housing a chainsaw. Lights dim as another figure appears in background singing Gladys Knight and the Pips' "A Midnight Train to Georgia". The main actor begins a series of ritualistic movements choreographed to the music. Instead of dancing backup steps in typical Pip fashion, the actor as Charlie Chan performs what can be interpreted as martial arts forms, which eventually evolve into a lawnmowing motion.

On one hand to regulate by an imposed aesthetic on grass length growth signifies to viewers perhaps a very rigid orthodoxy. A conditioned response taught that becomes ingrained as predisposition learned indirectly by outside of educational influences as the videotaped documentation of mowing the lawn illustrates. This Charlie Chan ghost-like figure represents the assimilated nonAsian Hollywoodized ideal of the emasculated, effeminate Asian male as the heroic good guy who fits, despite obvious "Orientalistic" traits, into the prevailing stereotype.

To merge, even collide cultural images through collage technique parallels a freer approach allowing for a circular flow that is less definitive in the logical linearity often accused of my earlier work. Which loosely explains the question of the recurring image of Charlie Chan. It certainly references a different popular cultural icon familiar to the mass public.

The image projected above and directly behind the indoor lawn shows a static shot of a backyard cropped to exaggerate its vertical plane. Every thirty seconds to a minute approximately, the abovementioned figure will pass through this frame either in the fore or background pushing a gas-powered mower. Within a certain amount of time, the artist and mower, outside the periphery of the viewer, starting from the outer edge involutes toward the center into permanent view for the remaining duration of this shot.

The protagonist, in turn, parodies the Homeowner maintaining status quo, acquiescing to community standards of a "keeping up with Jones" social order. Perhaps, seeing someone wearing a white suit suggests to the viewer a hired domestic servant performing manual labor associated with upkeeping the estate. Usually minorities are employed to function in these roles. Constant subliminal seduction compels the individual of means to believe that lawn care excellence equals the achievement of material happiness. And what is more typical to highlight this notion than domesticating nature. But is the question again of how an ethnic minority becomes influenced to see things in singularly Western criteria readable? And to what extent is this question relevant, or even important, to a general (nonethnic-specific) audience?

Add to this discourse and growing project yet another idea for a different work that deals with the passive wisdom associated with Asian culture: Which is stronger; a stone, unyielding and hard? Or water, flowing and translucent? This often-told parable examines the question of how nature or science is literally perceived within a bicultural context. Usually how one answers or perceives this question results from their cultural upbringing or perspective.

Show a stone being dropped into a pool of water from bird's eye view. As the rock or pebble falls and sinks toward the bottom, narration informs the viewer of a sifu (master) instructing his younger disciple this parable by asking him the aforementioned question. The dialogue is comparable in style and tone of the character Kwai Chang Cain from the television series, "Kung Fu". As the narrator reveals the correct answer in his wisdom to be "water", the viewer sees water engulfing the stone to prove his point. Shoot as video or possibly as a series of photographs. In contrast, quickly intercut to another shot of a rock of indeterminate size as it falls through the air. Underneath its path as its target is a glass of clear water. As the rock lands, the glass is crushed, broken into many shards, splashing water everywhere. The rock, one can clearly see, is twice the size of the glass of water. These videos to be projected on wall when performance of actor as Charlie Chan dances kung fu moves to the Gladys Knight and the Pips song.

The oppositional format of these videos impugns what is perceived as the timeless truisms of fortune cookie philosophy and what is perceived as the physical, empirical experimentation that is part of a general Western societal attitude reliant on the scientific method. Like the lawn project, one can infer how the subversion of this parable in Western terms as the rock smashes a glass of water is another form of cultural imperialism. But mainly both videos act as pro and con dialogue, which expresses the dichotomous opinions of and my bicultural reaction to nature as a whole. How what is seen, felt, and experienced contributes to the confusion that is my bicultural western upbringing.

Given the fact that these projects deal with like issues is excuse enough "to go off the road" and experiment---not in the usual "you're in grad school---go ahead, try something new" way, but something else, a freer, less self-conscious approach to challenge the methodology, the aesthetic, the solemnity that pigeonholes most of my recent work. That is the main criticism of my work: that each finished piece is considered a complete thought, a singular self-contained metaphor related to a larger body of work. So meeting with Drea Howenstein during the summer produced a more poetic way of seeing how all these loosely related ideas might come together: tentative connections from each idea that appear somewhat ambiguous at first but are very much relatable in terms of an afterimage. One can see how each work resonates as a circular, almost contiguous narrative; each component overlapping, a residual sense of being part of but separate from its antecedent. What it becomes is something less defined than from earlier work; more of an ongoing than complete thought.

I am dealing to locate a consistent theme to reconciliate these disparate realities that beg some form of, or suggests a, conflictual solution. Think seriously about how the quality of a video affects the grass itself. To show the actual grass in darkness in order for the projected image to register is cause for the grass to die. The visibility (or lack of---unclarity) of this image is the metaphysical shadow alluded to that results in the dilemma of which direction the overall project follows: an issue of controlling or being controlled by the colonizational influence.

Ultimately, what came to pass resulted in taking chances beyond the familiar. Trying a different approach to projects that otherwise might look and feel the same as if the shoe fits, wear it. The entire process itself weaving from one tangent to another link back to the original taught me a new way of seeing how I would normally go about business. Analysis through my writing process clarified to a less cryptic degree the relationships between each idea. I begin to see the structure of this ongoing work as episodic in nature. Or as example, one work as an element speaking to the others as a whole.

It now seems that the bulk of what consumed my studio time focused more on conceptualization than actual artmaking. There is nothing tangible other than this recap on paper and my sketchbook to document the evolution of what essentially is an idea. Everytime I examined one direction, other questions would crop up as a result causing constant backtracking to cover all bases. To be truthful, as the project progressed through the summer term, what I originally thought to be sketches quickly implemented, snowballed into something that overextended and challenged the ordered little world of how I see making art. And that is, I have come to accept, a very good thing. Considering the condensed time frame of the summer term, not great timing but a very rewarding learning experience nonetheless. My conclusion is to continue slowly to examine the particular components of this huge undertaking before actually committing wholly to its execution. So as is my habit, work on this "eight hundred pound gorilla" will continue along with other projects as well.

Notes on "First go in, then close the door"

Luaun doors abutted together in descending sequence forming in gradual steps an architectural structure show the physical manifestation of Chinese calligraphic stroke order. A series of pen on vellum drawings illustrate as architectural blueprints the axiom of "First go in, then close the door" employed as a mnemonic device to correctly write the ideogram for the word "sun" in Chinese. The written character resembles a square with a line horizontally bisecting its center. To form a box first and then draw a line across is incorrect stroke order. An apt analogy in architectural terms would be to impugn the logic of enclosing the exterior walls first without an opening to allow entry into the interior. Constructing these doors as a penmanship exercise follows the Confucian notion of a priori linearity. Each step is akin to the mathematical absolute of lineal progression.


Small frames showing each individual brushstroke in exact stroke order are hung in between each appropriately actuated door counterpart. Placement of the doors in accordance with the diagrams is deliberately reversed to emphasize the difference in the reading orientation in most Asian cultures. Conceptually the doors dematerialize from the typical Western reading of left to right, deconstructed into an ironic minimalist aesthetic evoking weighted cultural and political connotations of inclusion and exclusion, of access. The interrelationship of how these disciplines overlap defines the parallel of the axiomatic as it relates to the calligraphic and its particular application to the architectural.

Modestly Speaking

A modest proposal entails transforming a closet space in which two possibilities exist:

One notion nostalgicizes retro-sixties television kitsch via Batman, in particular, the moveable secret bookcase which slides open to reveal twin Batpoles when either Bruce or Dick or even Alfred triggered the hidden button inside the hinged flip-top Shakespeare bust. An interior meant for storage hollowed out as disguised passageway acts as extended metaphor for the transfiguration of alter ego to something superhuman, or of mythological proportions. Such iconography transcends the popular cultural landscape to denote a historiography of place related to representations of Self versus Other. Recreating the set from this show casts a mirrored reflection that reverberates in perpetuity, image repeated in descending order.

Perhaps build a bookcase into the actual door left slightly ajar allowing a glimpse inside of video footage from actual show or reenactments of parts of different episodes.

Or install a handmade Japanese doorway curtain or ornate screen in front of three Chinese lanterns alternately flashing red, green or yellow light attached onto walls.

On a sense of rotisserie time

The current cycle governing day to night spins an imperfect circle. It continues to roll but in wobbly fashion, feinting first to the right then hestitantly left like a young Jackie Chan stumbling about in Drunken Master. No matter how familiar though, the terrain it traverses is quite acned and potholed. Nonetheless the roundish shape being drawn completes an unconventional though predictable track.

Which might explain how rotisserie leagues affect the change of seasons and consequently the perception of time. As the work of On Kawara suggests, how is time typographically or conceptually marked? Like a ticking clock whose second hand accumulates incremental space, every causal effect of any sporting feat so connected to the human experience becomes an abstract number instead. Is this the simulacrum that Jean Baudrillard refers to? To be so far removed from the actual thing so as to champion its substitute in another compacted form metamorphosizes into pure spectatorship. Except that flesh and blood then assumes a postmodernist quality divorced from its self-contained reality. These flattened images subsequently lose their primacy to reference the concrete action of physical interaction only.

The significance of inscribing meaning to an essentially leisure culture is then hypervalued because the spectacle of the event is implied, literally read between the lines. What constitutes a historical record develops to produce a fictional nostalgia manufacturing an industry of retailed memorabilia. But the relationship between documentation of performance and its objective form as collectible translates into cyberspace as hinted at by author Robert Coover. Is there any benefit psychically to be derived for a particpant from engaging secondhand the vicarious thrill of the Modernist glory of sports?

This obsession descends daily, sometimes even hourly, but to be so preoccupied with the aggregation of statistics is abnormal. Or can it be a subconscious project of redundant movements that dictate the gist of urban existence as Tehching "Sam" Hsieh demonstrated in his yearlong performances?

Prima Facie

City of Chicago
Department of Revenue
P.O. Box 88298
Chicago, IL 60680-1298


To whom it may concern:

I am writing to contest the parking ticket # 0017704423-12 issued for code violation 9-80-110A Abandoned Vehicle.

On the date in question of this violation, I drove from my house near Howard and Western in the early morning at 8:30 AM to the Lakewood Balmoral neighborhood. As is my customary practice and in clear observance of posted No Parking and other signs, I parked my vehicle about 8:45 AM on Magnolia in order to ride the El to my office downtown from the Berwyn stop. On this specific evening, I returned from work to pick up my vehicle at approximately 9:15 PM. That I was ticketed for having legally parked my vehicle on the street for what amounts to twelve and a half hours hardly constitutes abandoning my vehicle.

Please understand that photodocumentation to prove my claim is impossible to provide as I simply drove my vehicle away from where it was supposedly abandoned. I must stress that my vehicle is fully operational and in good working condition. I cannot fathom why a ticket for abandoning my vehicle was issued for a car parked legally for half a day on a public city street.

Thank you for your time.


Sincerely,

Notes on a former Chicago Cub lefthanded pitcher from the late fifties

Where are you now, Larry Jackson?

In the bullpen warming up with Grover Alexander maybe? Or hitting long fungoes to Tris Speaker? But Hot Potato actually threw righthanded, contrary to what Johnny Poy Lee recalled. So was that the legacy a soon-to-be father from Toishan saw on the mound that sunny day?

The predestiny of nomenclature explains running into your doppelganger crisscrossing ordained basepaths somewhere out on Idaho fields. At six foot two inches tall weighing one hundred ninety pounds, the ball released sixty feet six inches away probably zoomed in faster than ninety-plus miles per hour. But did he command a breaking pitch, something off-speed or more wicked like a nasty slider?

Perhaps old footage exists of his delivery, his signature windup. Then the possibility to copy his motion, to assume if you will his identity becomes an idea for a project exploring the nature of imitation.

Beyond Jack Benny

Twenty plus twenty equals forty, the sum of which is determined in dog years. This sad fact magnified its internal logic as truism only yesterday while duffing the fairways. The night before saw some two hundred and thirty odd balls being launched from automated two-tiered Astroturf mats to break in new graphite woods and double-cavity irons. A mere five hours later at the first tee only continued the lactic acid buildup.

Gone are the carefee days of weekend warriorism when mind and body readily cooperated to wake up early dawn en route to nine holes immediately followed by an hour of shooting hoops or softball practice all before opening up shop by noon. After closing the day usually ended pitching three to five innings at Stewart.

Such rubber-armedness once proved the resiliency of youth. Or the foolhardiness of growing up consumed by sports enough to play out childhood fantasies well past sensible adulthood. Then comes the inevitable reality of sore, tired muscles which signals going out to pasture.

Eighteen holes regardless of carts or not tend to exacerbate any delusions of former athletic grandeur. Sure, to hit straight, long and narrow after the compound ankle fracture is reward enough for the yips, but not by much as conventional wisdom states, "Drive for show, putt for dough."

But pain is still the unenviable currency of the aged.