Galatea Resurrects 15

Galatea Resurrects #15 was released last month. Thanks to Eileen Tabios for including my review. Below the excerpt is a list of this issue's contributors.

Inside the sound of words are entanglements fighting for coherence, or some sense of it, at least. Approximations of this coherence can materialize in imagination of the speaker, especially through the visuality of text, a compact architecture of curves and lines furnished by constitutions of desire in writing and printing presses, processes that may formulate a sense of accessibility and familiarity, through journeys in reading. Thus, implicit in certain theories of language is a dance that intimates copulation of perceptions between text-image and its equivalent sound, whether through orally-conveyed sound or sound produced that cannot easily be translated into decibels recognizable by human-ear – sounds of silence, or those in meditation, which may also include sounds in structure of movements, the sonicity of action, especially in the context of physical vibrations and physical geometries. And in this dance are certain modes of producing rules or memory set in principles, to activate hierarchy of evolutions, and inherent devolutions in progressions. [ More here.]

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 Access Table of Contents here.
Reviewers & Contributors

Aileen Ibardaloza
Albert B. Casuga
Allen Bramhall
Anny Ballardini
Barbara Roether
Camille Martin
Edric Mesmer
Eileen Tabios
Eric Dickey
Eric Hoffman
G.E. Schwartz
Genevieve Kaplan
Hadas Yatom-Schwartz
Harry Thorne
Jeff Harrison
Jim McCrary
John Bloomberg-Rissman
John Herbert Cunningham
Jon Curley
Kathryn K. Stevenson
Kristi Castro
Kristina Marie Darling
L.M. Freer
Lisa Bower
Lynn Behrendt
Margaret H. Johnson
Marianne Villanueva
Michael Caylo-Baradi
Michael Pollock
Moira Richards
Nicholas T. Spatafora
Patrick James Dunagan
Peg Duthie
Rebecca Loudon
Richard Lopez
T.C. Marshall
Thomas Fink
Tom Beckett

Boxing Royalty

While undressing the Christmas tree, news announced that Interstate 5 has become hazardous to drive around Castaic, because of snow showers. On the small table above, the duchess, her court, and other royal elements that were hanging out from that tree are now bound for the medieval-dimness of storage boxes, once again, until the reappearance or renaissance of their reign, later this year.

Insomnia Los Angeles

You are filament in this glowing dissonance.

You dissolve me into latitudes,where
we levitate into sidewalks without lights.

Miss Havisham's Flower

If Miss Havisham, in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, would make a catalog of neglected gardens in Los Angeles, she may have a hard time making that, not because many would qualify, but because she might not prefer to use Excel, or other qualified software to collate that long list; she'd probably prefer Victorian Era collating methods.

The garden, in this picture, might not necessarily qualify as a neglected garden, to her, because there's still life in it, still saturated with green. On the other hand, it's possible she'd put this somewhere on the top of her list, particularly because of the one flower visible here, still red, but appears withering out of its color. It's a fitting representation of Miss Havisham's interior life, disintegrating, expanding under shadows of great expectations once nurtured in love.

Into New York City

Video Source: Thought Catalog

I first saw this short video at Thought Catalog, a listopia of anything conceivably listable you may not immediately think of cataloging. I love the video-tour into NYC history. Historian Steve Duncan opening that manhole (?) at one in the morning looked risky. But when Steve went up Williamsburg Bridge at 3:30AM, while director/cinematographer Andrew Wonder was trying to steady his camera, I thought I'd slip down the bridge myself, at some point. Then, this dynamic duo heightens the drama in this clip and shows Steve on one of the large suspension cables, without a protective harness, only holding the cable-rails of that suspension cable, while walking on it. Amazing. And of course the standard caution: he warns us not to do at home what he is about to do, before walking on that cable; but in a way though, we are. We are walking into his New York City, the history of that space, or even the history of space as New York City.

Image Source: Wikipedia

Some lines I came across in 2010

Many memorable lines for me in 2010. I only have some of them below. I found most of them, from the internet, especially through blogs and on-line literary magazines, and others from books in my local public-library system. Occasionally, my local library displays a box of free books, in its lobby. One of the books I found in that box was The Modern Poets: An American-British Anthology, published in 1963. The poets included in this anthology appear to be a catalog of prominent poets writing in English, back then. It's a big book, in content, and probably belongs to a specific era in publishing. One of the poets I like in this anthology is Cecil Day Lewis, the father of actor Daniel Day Lewis. Lewis is on the list below. More lines soon.

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He grew orchids on his roof
and slept there in an August
of derelict hotels burning, smoke
rushing up like a gutted down pillow
into streets thick and red with ambulances
screaming the air raw and bleeding.
Kate Braverman ("By Madness Wooed")

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its life cinders on
until this ultimate imploding,
one deafening blast to climax rite
as loved ones writhe, ashen
in their own consumed shells,[...]
Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta ("One Final Burning")

†††

Her eyes have made a loyalist of me.
On the last day of winter, is it natural
my future resembles lime grapes? What cost
will I pay for the rapture of a solarium?
I wouldn’t have thought I’d fall so easily for
bejeweled eddies. I am seduced by the fever coming
off the shores of her eyelids. My inbox is oblivious
to my steadfast gaze. As they say in Petra, I prefer
you cut into the hillside of my mountain, which means
your face is the coastline to my dreams.
Major Jackson ("Here The Sea")

†††

And memories sleep
Like mammoths in lost caves. [...]
Cecil Day Lewis ("Departure In The Dark")

†††

Awake, I strike a word against the dark
like a match. This could be the past
we are leaving. Buses on high beams;

wild eyes that ride down the road’s
unpromising narrative. The sky at a loss
for stars, thick as a foreign tongue.
Cyril Wong ("Night Bus")

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Happy New Year!!!

Happy New Year
Feliz Ano Nuevo
Happy New Year
Happy New Year
Happy New Year
Happy New Year
Happy New Year
Happy New Year
Happy New Year
Happy New Year
Happy New Year
Happy New Year
Happy New Year

2010 recedes to evening

I took this shot around Halloween, up there, at the Griffith Park Observatory. The evening was a bit warm. Clouds took their nap, that evening, and gave it up for clear skies. That's why Santa Catalina Island is surprisingly visible here, a slight protrusion on the horizon. And thanks to the editor who accepted the image, for publication, including the caption I wrote. I think I'll submit a few more shots, to the Los Angeles Times next year. Southern California Moments is one way of touring Los Angeles, and other places around it; my photo is #35, on the slide (as of 12-31-2010).

Now a few years ago, I had also sent a shot of Los Angeles from the Hollywood Hills, to another paper, The Guardian(UK). But on that shot, I stood beside a tree, to include its image. I took the shot in the middle of the afternoon, facing that same side of the city captured above. But since it was a smoggy day, the effect can be depressing for some. I like the tree branches, their silhouettes. But the image caption - which I assume was written by that paper's travel-section editor - gave that image a different spin, as though the shot was taken after the end of the world. Here's that shot archived at The Guardian:

Swaddling Cloths

I was wrapping some gifts early afternoon on the 24th, and got caught in the process of folding the gift-wrap paper properly. I made sure the folds around the edges of the small boxes I was wrapping were not too creased, and approximated the look one sees on professionally wrapped gifts. I think I was somewhat successful. I usually buy gift bags. This time though, I thought I'd use gift-wrapping paper, the kind that's colonized by Santa Claus smiles. But as my hands felt the texture of paper I was folding and taping, my mind slipped into some vague memories of Christmas in childhood, a time that usually involved Christmas school programs, and images of a baby born in a manger, dramatized and choreographed by bodies of children.

I think I was a Joseph once or twice, and a shepherd or king a few times. Predictably, the dominant words that wrapped these yearly programs were Christmas, Jesus, or Baby Jesus, including Bethlehem. Thus, I can say there were many Bethlehems in my past, illuminated by the smiles and giggles of their nativity-scene actors. In these Bethlehems were usually plastic babies. That baby's name and what he stands for are probably two swaddling cloths, out of a few, that has been holding this world and its history for centuries, which may not be babies anymore. The firm hold persists, as the crying continues. You can't help but hold it close to you, and sometimes lull the cries with lullabies.

Georgia O'Keefe

Early this year, I saw Georgia O'Keefe, a film that offers glimpses of Georgia O'Keefe's life, when she met photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz in New York. And the nature of this relationship is the approximate center of the film. Because of this focus, one is tempted to argue that the film doesn't talk much about O'Keefe's art, although as it handles this aspect of her life, Bob Balaban's direction tries to connect, in his own quiet way, her art and her relationship with Stieglitz.

Stieglitz's keen eye for art talents sees potential in the budding painter in O'Keefe, and displays some of her work in his small gallery; there, her paintings sit beside the work of European artists who, over time, would achieve respect, fame, and, in many cases, fortune from affluent art patrons in the United States.

Stieglitz understands the business side of art, that the rich plays indispensable roles in preserving the work of artists. Thus, as art promoter, Stieglitz's gallery courts the super-rich. And this courtship somehow imbues the affluent with evolving layers of taste and sophistication, elements that quietly superimpose and gloss-over notions of barbarity and greed implied in being very rich. On the other hand, this courtship is surrounded by writers, critics who feed on details in the art world, and refine them into essays for the general public to consume.

In some sense, Stieglitz's personality evolves and revolves around the charms and sensibilities of this intimate social circle. As invaluable member of that circle, his appetite for women is accepted by its members, that somehow the institution of marriage gives him social and sexual claustrophobia. Thus, when Stieglitz marries O'Keefe, he is still married to someone else; and while he is married to O'Keefe, he becomes involved with another woman, from the Sears-Roebuck business clan.

Often, Jeremy Irons' Stieglitz threatens to rename the film Alfred Stieglitz, because he constantly pushes O'keefe and the film under his control. Luckily, Joan Allen gives her O'keefe gravity, imposing enough for me to believe the movie still vaguely deserves to be titled under the lustrous banner of the painter's name.

Hard Copies

It's that point of the year again, when you look around your own living space, and think what must go, not the kind one does during spring-cleaning, but the kind one indulges, when a new year is fast approaching. The idea is not to impose some kind of resolution, of course, that you'd now hope to be a newbie super-neatnik, but just a lessening of accumulated things. For me, these things are old newspapers and magazines from, say, May or April of this year and the year before. Saying this somewhat reveals I'm a pack-rat of some sort; maybe. But if I'm one, I'm not too worried. It's not something that needs to be pathologized. Although pathological pack-rat can sound amusing, or can be a catchy title for a novel, short-story, or song.

I'd say pack-rat tendencies are basic to habits of accumulation and acquisition in the imagination of capitalism, a system - some might say - that breathes on hierarchies of private ownership, and, in that regard, hierarchies of power. But I don't think accumulating old newspapers and magazine makes me power-hungry. Although I'm compelled to contradict myself, because owning these publications can mean being hungry for the power of knowledge and information. Many out there make millions from pack-rats, as you know; I'm talking about owners of storage spaces. They guard what you own, and in turn they own some from your pocket, through monthly payments.

I'm actually throwing some of these old magazines and newspapers already, since early this month, which makes me think about bookmarked websites on my browser I haven't used for a while. These favorites are accumulating, as well. And this makes me think about those old newspapers and magazines I'm trashing. Their content is not really gone, because the ever-evolving wonders of internet technology is managing and tracking their content through archives, memory banks of human civilization, or maybe post-human and cyborg civilization as well. That's why it makes sense to throw the hard-copies; on the other hand, what is also thrown here is the tactility of hard-copies, the crispness of that material thing. Content somehow feels more compelling, when you feel that paper with your hands.

Reign of Rain

It has been raining continuously, turning many intersections into shallow, temporary lakes, because of clogged draining systems. And not only that, mud is sliding down hillsides as well, as though it wants to dramatize how things are slipping down fast in the current economic condition. It would be nice though if temperatures drop further down a bit in Los Angeles city-proper, so that snow can moonlight, even for a few hours, for this year's Christmas Eve.

Without Shadow of Flowers

The sun is 4pm, slowly setting, finishing Sunday. I am 75mph on the freeway, maybe more. Others are flying at 80mph and up. I feel like catching up to them, but hover my speed below the 80s, like it's cooler to be there, the way some people hate leaving the 70s or the Age of Disco. Lenny Kravitz spits cool through my speakers, makes them high. I play one of his tunes, a few times, because of its beat, and the way it gives the afternoon some rhythm. Forest Lawn Drive is my next exit, after making a last minute decision to visit two loved ones, buried beside each other. I am now rock-and-rolling towards a field of death-beds. Beside the road are flower vendors who cause attentions of rushing drivers to crash into them.

I decide to leave out flowers on this visit. There are already flowers beside the tombstones; they look fresh, from someone's recent visit. I assume that recent visitor has cleaned the stones carefully, because dirt and soil are not stuck around the letters and numbers on the stones. Goaded by vague superstition, I make some numerical calculations on the number of letters and numbers on the stones, to come up with numerical similarities, to force out mysteries from the results. Some cemetery visitors around or near me must have thought I was deep in prayer, because of my posture, and the suggestion of concentration it conveyed.

Cold breezes remind me what I needed to do that night. I do not stay long there. I should've said a prayer. But I do not know what I would've said. I think it is better to visit the dead when one is at home, drinking coffee, staring at the sky outside, at a wall, while on a traffic jam, browsing through photo albums, or in one's writing, in an essay, story, or poem. Visiting someone's grave is depressing, is affirming not only the dead-ness of dead bodies one used to know but their souls as well, like they're not part of you now, and, therefore, must warrant a 'physical' visit to pull them back to your memory. Whenever I see those stones, I see memories named in stone. I go back there, over and over again, as though trying to reclaim alignments, inevitable displacements.

Braverman - Escora

Image Source: HIRAYA GALLERY
INNOCUOUS - KIKO ESCORA
122 x 113 cm. Charcoal on Paper. 2001.


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Winter Blues
Kate Braverman

The women are extravagant with lace
and sadness.
They listen to Lady Day incessantly.
They, too, wear flowers and the tooth marks
of tiny metal needles.

Love is killing them.
Love is killing them.

They buy French negligees
to weep in.
They wait at cold windows
in high-heeled satin sandals,
fixed like moths in reverse,
drunk on the draft.
Their feet turn blue.

Young men refuse them,
saying they hate women that cling.
Their arms fall off.

They are exquisite with silence,
undemanding as a vase of out-of-season
gardenias, perishing quiet as transplanted skin.

They chart their abandonment.
Glistening empty shell
of vodka and heroin.
They know what it is to be limbless,
to bury a father,
to cross the damp grass,
select the plot.
Their daughters don’t call.
It’s been six years since that cruise to Jamaica.

Love is killing them.
Love is killing them.


They do not expect marriage proposals
or hand-painted dolls of porcelain
in a Christmas stocking.
They’re no one’s girl.
That’s how the cards fell.
Seven of cups, the kings upended.

They keep going, polishing their scars,
begging for love, saying give me a postcard,
a trinket, a pat on the head,
a promise, even if you break it.

Night is dammed by hidden gas lamps,
chill as the rained into basement rooms
where forbidden séances are held
and the occasional dead enter
edgy as insomniacs,
nerves bitten raw by worms,
flesh diaphanous as incense.

Such women are tough as glass.
Sing to them, they shatter.


This poem is borrowed from
katebraverman.com.

Tao Lin

Video-Clip Source: Tao Lin Blog
I feel I'm clicking my mouse endlessly to numerous links, and the mouse's journey through information, after information, and into information forms a highly elastic narrative. It feels brilliant. There are times I remember Ron Silliman. But that's not a comparison.

Intransitive Drive

Night lights can be comforting, while driving home from work. They give you a glow inside, shades and saturations of neon in salty fast-food, dripping greasy welcome to another phase in your day-night convergences. You don't want to drive fast, because you don't really want to go home yet. You pretend you are homeless, wandering, on the road, at home in anything intangible. You think about buying groceries, putting gas in your car, or stop by a convenience store for a cup of coffee. The options are laid out before you, ready to be ignored. You keep driving into what you're about to think or do spontaneously.

You don't take the freeway this time, but a longer route, through a road that winds downhill. Again, there's music in your car, but its volume isn't too loud. Traffic lights appear between long intervals on that road. You don't want to stop on a red light, and so you press on your gas the way you press in what can be. On your rear-view mirror, you see cars, and feel the shadows in your thoughts. Soon, you will tailgate someone yourself, who will get annoyed and slow down a bit.

Trees along the road uniform to colors of denied expectations, the color of shadows, silhouettes. You've opened your window a bit for some air. You glance at the time on your dashboard, still early for anything related to rest. You can feel the speed of your car. But the feeling doesn't have anything to do with adrenaline, maybe boredom, or that thing about driving that moves your body while not necessarily moving your body, that sweet sensation of being transported somewhere, into the rippling haloes of invisible moonlights.

after a Bad Romance (Lady Gaga),...

Video-Clip Source: LadyGagaVEVO

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And to some, what trails
a period of bad romance is an
age of permutations,
which probably nurtures
eras of reputations.



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Mood in Age of Permutations depicted here:



Poem originally appeared at BlazeVox 2010.

And for recent discussions about poetry, visit:
Galatea Resurrects #15.
Edited by:
EILEEN TABIOS.

Pollinating

Image Source: Kulay-Diwa
Santiago Bose, "Can't go back Home again", Mixed Media, 87 x 123, cms, 1998.

We dissolve into wounds, the way moonbeams huddle in scent of flowers knotting redundant dreams into symmetries in foreboding. Our convictions slice us through colors of blood, into a body, of convulsions, erratic, rhythmic as bees buzzing around premonitions blooming petals of a city pollinating.

Angela Merkel / Euro Multi Kulti

Video-Clip Source: Russia Today

Los Bastardos

Empowered Bastards
Read this essay's full-text at Latin American Review of Books.

AMAT ESCALANTE’S Los Bastardos is a film about two undocumented, migrant workers, from Mexico named Jesús and Fausto, played by non-professional Mexican actors Jesús Moises Rodriguez and Rubén Sosa, and traces their life as day-labourers within a 24-hour period through a narrative set in the vast collage of cities and suburbs of Los Angeles County. [1]

The film opens with the two workers walking on a dry and wide river canal on their way to join other labourers waiting at a street corner for work. Together with four others, somebody hires them for a construction project. Then, after a full-day’s work, they get paid, go “home” to a section of a public park, and try to rest.

But their need for night-time diversion takes them to a quiet neighbourhood near the park where they follow their instincts. Something, after sundown, tells them they must rob a house.

Director Amat Escalante does not show us how they choose which house to rob; we just see them enter through a window. When the homeowner, Karen – played by professional actress Nina Zavarin – sees Jesús holding a shotgun, she screams. But she is able to control her panic and, shortly, she feeds them dinner, spends time at the pool with them, has sex with Jesús, then gets high with them before Fausto accidentally blows her head off.

When the homeowner’s son arrives home, he kills Jesús using their shotgun. Fortunately, since it was the last bullet, Fausto’s life is saved - he runs from the neighbourhood as fast as he can.

Now alone, Fausto finds employment picking strawberries and, as he does so, the camera zooms in on his face, slowly letting it dominate the screen. In this final shot, Escalante tries to capture or construct a quiet collision of chaos, alienation, and memories of violence from his life in southern California as Fausto scans something in the field not framed on-screen.

In 2008, Los Bastardos was an official selection for the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard award. [2] Escalante’s first film, Sangre, had also been entered for the award in 2005. [3]

Since its Cannes premiere, Escalante’s second film continues to gain critical attention that often stresses its quiet visual-texture and unexpected, violent ending. In many ways, its unapologetic use of violence stimulates perceptions about its Mexican director’s political views. Certainly, US-Mexico border relations, immigration and race are elements that can all be readily implicated in the film’s uneasy ending.

There are many instances of Jesús’ and Fausto’s marginal status in southern California that can be explored. Indeed, their determination to survive in that savage world reveal the strength of their characters. But that strength must deal with their sense of cultural dislocation and alienation. The development of this ineluctable collision weakens these characters, impacts the moral dimension of their behavior, and contributes to or empowers Jesús’ and Fausto’s reckless disregard for the world around them.

And so, Escalante succeeds in calling his protagonists bastards, thus aptly giving his film its title: Los Bastardos.

Californios

Escalante’s initial image of southern California is a steady shot of a wide river canal, part of a drainage system that often saves the region’s vast assemblage of suburban areas from catastrophic hydraulic asphyxiations during the rainy season.

This shot is held for so long that, for a while, we suspect the two slow-moving objects in the middle of the screen are animals heading towards the camera. Eventually though, we recognise an older adult male, in his thirties, and another who appears stuck in the twilight of adolescence and adulthood: Jesús and Fausto, respectively.

Showing the small-ness of these two moving objects before we recognise they are people de-emphasises the humanity of the workers, and underlines the dominance of the concrete structure they are walking on - a vast structure built on the complex and calculated union of technology, ideas, manpower, politics, and funds.

Read this essay's full-text at
Latin American Review of Books.

Directed by Amat Escalante,
2008, 90 minutes (English and Spanish)
Mantarraya/Tres Tunas/No Dream/
Foprocine/Le Pacte/Ticoman

Notes:
1 Los bastardos at IMDB
2 Cannes Film Festival link
3 Short article about director on Cannes Film Festival website

Edgy Evaporations

To be in labyrinth of colors probably feels like being trapped in morning dew on edges of petals. There's the scrambling before total evaporation, when night's constitution of dreams disintegrates like words disappearing during acts of reading. The sun perfects this abolition, into flames of intensity, in movements where our quotidian avoids abortions in ordinariness.

Omar Musa "Hemingway"

Omar Musa "Hemingway" (Dir: Tom Spiers)from MRTVIDZ on Vimeo.
I first watched this at Mascara Literary Review.

Clinically Dead For 16 Hours

Video-Clip Source: thecamerawalls

BlazeVox Fall2010

BlazeVOX2kX Fall 2010

Contributing Authors: Alban Fischer, Amy Hard, Amanda Stephens, Amy Lawless, Amylia Grace, Andrea Dulanto, AE Baer, Anisa Rahim, Antony Hitchin, Brad Vogler, Barbara Duffey, Benjamin Dickerson, Bob Nimmo, Billy Cancel, Brian Edwards, Brian Anthony Hardie, Ashley Burgess, Carlos Ponce-Meléndez, Carol Smallwood, Caroline Klocksiem, Chad Scheel, Christine Herzer, Darren Caffrey, David Toms, Debrah Morkun, Diana Salier, Donna Danford, David Plumb, Ed Makowski, Elizabeth Brazeal, Eric Wayne Dickey, Erin J. Mullikin, Julie Finch, Flower Conroy, George McKim , Geoffrey Gatza, Sarah Sweeney, Geer Austin, Heather Cox, henry 7. reneau, jr, Howie Good, Ivan Jenson, Ian Miller, James Mc Laughlin, Jason Joyce, Jeff Arnett, Julia Anjard Maher, Joshua Young, Jennifer Thacker, Kate Lutzner, Kelci M. Kelci, Laura Straub, Martin Willitts Jr, Margot Block, Myl Schulz, Camille Roy, Megan Milligan, Michael Caylo-Baradi, Michael Crake, Michael Hartman, Nick Miriello, Nicole Peats, Orchid Tierney, Philip Sultz, SJ Fowler, Steven Taylor, Steve Potter, Stephan Delbos, Simon Perchik, Sean Neville, Sarah Sousa , Bob Whiteside, Ricardo Nazario y Colón, Santiago del Dardano Turann, John Raffetto, Bruce Bromley, Carl Dimitri, Gregory Dirkson, Jordan Martich, Natalie McNabb, Moura McGovern, Jennifer Houston, Robert Vaughan, Christi Mastley, pd mallamo and bruno neiva.

Ascent

There's a moment in twilight when splinters of red cut through my deliriums, and reveal hints of paradise.