Lizkdc Dislocation

An Urban Wood, and Mysterious Bits

Don't you love it when a weird little bit of mystery wanders into your life?

First off, one of the great things about postmodern city living is the empty spaces that open up even in the middle of dense development, and the way the woods creep and sneak back into the gaps.

And from something neglected or overlooked comes something cherished.

A February SOWA Night

From "I Make Things" melzeppelin.blogspot.com

There was so much I enjoyed about my Friday night.

It was a First Friday, Open Studio night in the art-land over in the far South End, what's now called Sowa (South of Washington). It's a neighborhood of brick warehouses, old power stations and the like, which once straggled empty between concrete tangle of the highway and the now-vanished elevated Orange Line train, and now have become artists galleries and lofts, candy boxes of creativity and whimsy and the enjoyable pretense and pose-iness of the art world.

Checked out a medley of paintings and photos and unclassifiable stuff, which was calming after my work week of anxiety and fuss.

Got to see my buddy Mel, and her Pete, show a selection of ornate creations. And meet up my friend Vasant, and then wander through this winter's unique mess of high icy snowbanks, passing white entombed bikes and cars and crazy massive icicles hanging threateningly from fire escapes.  I proved that I can bend someone's ear while clambering over a half mile of snow piles and icy brick sidewalks. Must be in my Boston genes.

When I first met Vasant, he was whining about the snow in Boston, and now he complains about the weak souls of his neighbors who fail to shovel well enough, which proves that he, too, is a proper Bostonian.

(Icicles...not the actual ones from Friday, but close enough).

Feast of the Epiphany: A Cold Coming We Had of It

 

It's the Feast of the Epiphany.

I used to love T. S. Eliot in a way that you can only love an artist when you yourself are young and guiltless.  Once you know a little more about yourself, and him, it's never quite the same. I walked in flowery parks in England and recited the horrible, beautiful dark lines and I knew nothing about anything, et cetera, but gods, was it pleasurable.

When you are old, and a little horrible yourself, you understand the poet better, but your love is not free of regret. Anyway, what a fantastic voice he has.

This Week in Confusing Autobiographical Movie Reviews: The King's Speech

It's a good movie, about the sort of cold-sweat shame and defectiveness that many of us feel.  Even if we never got starved by our nanny, and later, forced to give nationally broadcast speeches in spite of our painful speech defect, while taking over the difficult job abandoned by our selfish older sibling. 

Inception and Me, a Love Story (or At Least, a Bad Date)

Paris folded in half, and in half again.  Penrose stairs and other Escheresque games. Noirish hotel hallways of mystery, with elegant, mysterious-skinny Joseph Gordon-Levitt slipping through them, upside down and sideways. 

Dicaprio doing his bewildered, slightly battered man-of-honor shtick, leaving the impression of a hero who is just slightly too dim to have been tempted by the more outrageous possibilities of his situation.

Ingenious ingenue Ellen Page as a graduate student in architecture--oh menace of overdue education loans and unsatisfiable culture claims!   No wonder she sells out to the first faintly plausible employer who appears and lures her by destroying a cafe and pretending to take her seriously.

And French Oscar-winner lady Marion Cotillard playing that even more terrifying menace to chunky American manhood, a person who is both a wife and a European.  A menace more terrifying then a Death Star wrapped in a failed iPhone wrapped in a ripe chunk of sub-prime mortage, buddy.

Oh, and Christopher Nolan's insane genius for helming movies about beautiful, damaged, guilt-ridden men, his love for Hitchcock's exploitative take on Jimmy Stewart, and dudes who may or may not have killed their wives (if only they could remember) and the downtrodden underdog geniuses like Nicola Tesla and The Joker.

Inception, you are truly the most best movie of the summer. I love you with all of my damaged heart, infected by infinite comic book and Movie Loft and graduate-school-bullshit-theory ridden brain.  Call me, and we'll make beautiful, stupid love!

Like Wind From the Sea (A Writing Lesson)

Do you know what a cinquain is? I'm a word lover and a former English teacher and a writer and yet I didn't,  until a wonderful workshop this week at 826 Boston I helped at where . . .

"OH OH OH!"

"Keshon. Yes."

"Cinque is FIVE! That's SPANISH! I *know* Spanish!"

"Nuh UH you don!"

"Yeah I do! "

"Say summthin in Spanish! Say "you fat'!"

KIDS. No. Eyes on the teacher.  He's teaching a really great workshop. It's all about how we're going to learn to make a poem called a cinquain,  where there are five lines, each containing a set number of syllables . . .

About a Landscape

So I'm taking this class called "Word and Image" over at Leslie University/Art Institute of Boston, taught by the wonderful Karen Davis and Cassandra Goldwater.

This is the first homework I did for the class. It's, well, classy, I think.  There was a prompt given from Wallace Stevens (No Possum, No Sop, No Taters), and I was all over that jelly, with these wintery photos I've been making for the past few months, and some sketched in charcoal crows, and the carefully arranged objects from my garden: dry skeleton of coneflower, tendril of red-twig dogwood.

It was well-liked by others in class, and on target, and barring some production values which could be better, quite the sort of thing one does.

The problem I have with it is this is the sort of thing that got me into trouble to begin with, going all the way back to early days, school and what have you.  The ability to create intelligent answers to fit an assigned criteria, careful all the while to reveal as little as possible about myself and to make no commitments whatsoever to any point of view.

Snowflakes and Insufficiency

The camera--well, as wielded by me, right now--can't do justice to what the eyeball can see. 

The Arboretum's collection of evergreens from everywhere mean that in this small corner of Boston you have a winding Japanese pine and a towering Serbian spruce and a stand of skinny hemlock and some dense English gardeny ornamental shrubs all living together on a few hillsides, wound through by the original little brooks that shaped this neighborhood.

And then an especially clinging snow sifts down on it all and traces out all the detail -- long needles and short, small, personable little Christmas trees and 100 foot towers, evergreens with shapes that are dense, opaque and watchful, and others with open, swooping boughs like candelabra.  And it's so amazing?

It would be more admirable if I could truthfully write that I walked about this scene full of virtuous and clever thoughts about the natural world, its transformation in winter, and the oncoming New Year.

However, I did not.  I walked about it simultaneously overcome by a sense of sense-swamping beauty and complexity,  and my utter inability to *make* something of it. Each time I reach one level of satisfaction with picture taking, I seem to pass right into a sense of just how far down the learning scale I am with my camera, and get overcome with something very much like a nine year old child'lump-in-the-throat "WHO CARES ANYWAY!"

Beauty and Creepiness (Forest Hills Cemetery, Halloween Week)

You know about the Puritans and their whole death thing, if you grew up around here.  Because when you were just a weeny New England kid enjoying your schoolday of crayons, off-key singing and those tiny cartons of tepid milk, suddenly you would get dragged off to one of the local historic boneyards and given a tour of the places where all the famous history people were buried.  Paul Revere holding a silver teapot and all the Pilgrims and all the Colonial time people were down there somewhere. The Pilgrim people in their black and white uncomfortable outfits, the Revolution dudes with their triangle hats and wigs and kneesocks, the ladies in little squishy bonnets who were so useful about spinning cloth and making soap and boycotting tea.

Well, so the Puritans and other early colonists were pretty up front about death.  You look at their graves and what do you have? Skulls.  Cross-bones. Timeglasses with time-running out. Sometimes a full-on skeleton in a hoodie with his death-dealing scythe. You know, they didn't pretty things up much.

Sometime around the Civil War and all its sorrows and the Victorian period and all its proprieties, things changed, though.  The folks in Boston went out to what was then the edge of town and made this huge spectacular death park, with an ornamental lake, and a thousand graceful trees, and fancy gates, and filled it with stone lilies and wreaths and ornate urns instead of bones,  and monumental ladies covered in drapery and gentle regret. And angels--lots and lots of angels.

Maine, Danger, and Andrew Wyeth

There I was on the coast of Maine, and all the clams were singing.

On remote Route 73, the needs of man are reduced to the essentials: fried food, haircuts, truck repair, and Jesus. You can go for miles without seeing more then a tiny four-way stop sign village, but these core things will be for sale at each of them.