Did I drop something in the mail for the PSA contest? Yes. Do I think it will win? No. Does that matter? Not really.

I think the whole point of entering the contest was using the deadline to force myself to more or less finish a project. On Friday, I considered not even sending in the manuscript, as the point of preparing it for the contest had never really been the contest. But then I decided that if I didn't send it in, I couldn't claim it was finished, and I needed it to be done.

Of course, I'd already kind of lost interest in the PSA project this last week. I've started writing these prophetic hybrid things, and I'm curious to see where that will take me.

My brief and painful stint as a copywriter makes me inclined to agree with Loretta- writing that reverts automatically to someone else's property is really draining and probably worse for you creatively than not writing at all. I'm actually interested to hear how editing is better (never done any of it myself). Curious though, I have a not form myself to myself from way back that reads "art is what is unowned by anyone". Not even sure what to make of it in the context of this discussion.

Finally sitting down with the shambles of backed up files I have form before my computer go stolen back in September. Despite being the kind of person who has constant computer (and general life) catastrophes, I am yet to become the kind of person who backs up regularly. I've gone through phases of being very relieved I lost all that work, to being incredibly depressed. Given my lack of productivity since then, I have ot conclude that I work better with my other work available as immediate material. I'm not so good with a 'clean slate'. I'm hoping to have enough time outside of work and before teaching starts up again (in like two weeks- fuuuccckkk!) to sort all these files and maybe even reconstruct and re-edit my thesis.

But quick, before I go try to cram some drum practice in before my lesson tomorrow, some projects notes. I am obviously not going to get a chapbook done for PSA (Loretta, how's your going?), but the specter of that deadline has got my head going on small, treminal projects, as opposed to the epic, unending ones I usually imagine (and never complete). Walter K. Lew said to me a while back that I ought to consider a form that could unite all the disparate efforst of my life: drumming, composing (music), stone masonry, carpentry and writing (should I add general lunacy). For the longest time, I thought it would be some kind of performance art, an idea I haven't wholly abandoned. Jeremy James Thompson, friend and poet, sparked an interest in visual/physical arts as they intersect with text, and that captivated me for a while (and produced a whole other backlog of work I haven't broken ground on). Recently, in light of the chapbook idea, I've come full circle to writing. So, some proposals:

a chapbook of elegies for departed jazz drummers
a chapbook of poems on stone masonry and/or the building trades in general
a collected critical/creative work on the intersection of music and poetry in the U.S. 20th century-present (I think I mentioned that one before).

I'm hoping to make some real headway on those in the next few months, maybe even getting on eof the chapbooks compiled and handed out (in time for the chapbook party, I hope).

Caesura, from the Latin to cut, or the space we cut out for ourselves in the middle of all of the things we do to make economically viable the space we cut out for ourselves.

I'm no stonemason, but I understand the struggle between what we do "for money" and what we do "for art" and how the two begin to overlap, or how what is done "for money" obliterates any opportunity to do what is done "for art."

I am a writer-slash-editor, and I'm actually making a go of it freelance-style (I am continually amazed by that). When I am writing articles, generally research/interview pieces on real estate, I have trouble doing any other writing. The process just absorbs any words I have to give, until there's nothing else and I watch TV. Editing seems to leave a lot more (mental) room for writing poetry, and I'm trying to do more editing and less writing, but the writing ultimately pays better per hour.

But is my article on CMBS (commercial mortgage–backed securities, if you didn't know) "art"? I certainly don't consider it to be (although I was very pleased and flattered to hear that part of it will be reprinted in a real estate textbook). Even if an article is well-written, even if I take pleassure in carefully crafting it, the article isn't mine, in either the practical or the legal sense. I sign away copyright, the editor cuts as he pleases, and I rarely look at it once it's gone. So I understand what Dillon means by the importance of ownership. If I don't own it, then how can it be my art? And why do I care about such definitions (because obviously I do, or I wouldn't be going on at length)?

And if I found Dillon's cut stones to be aesthetically pleasing, isn't that enough? I feel no need to get hung up on the differentiation between art and craft, which only leads me into a rant about how visual artists (particularly at Mills) consider letterpress and bookmaking to be craft, and therefore not art. Which perhaps means that comparisons between masonry and bookmaking are even more apt than I'd first thought.

I'm adding a bunch of images from recent masonry projects that I want to think about vis-a-vie my current dillema- "is my job art?" I like putting it that way, because I think it shows the naked vanity of the question, but I seriously am troubled by it, and I think some form of the question about, or rather tension between, work and(/verse) art probably occupies all of us



The order is kind of screwy, but I wanted to show a bunch of job site photos, and then two brick pieces I've done recently to see if the overlap is positive or interesting. The brick pieces employ masonry materials and principles and are a lot of fun to build, but of course the point of them is the interaction between the text and the physical construction, which in and of itself isn't that interesting. With the text, its very easy for me to claim that the piece has "meaning", or is at least in the ballpark of meaning and thus its easier to claim that it's art (not that I'm racing to make "meaningfulness" a criterion of art, except maybe a sufficiency condition).

With the other photos, I wanted to show a few different examples of the kind of thing I build in stone all day. Without a doubt, aesthetic concerns are prevalent, if ot dominant in masonry. The fct is, you could skip the stone entirely and do all the structural work in concrete (though in some cases stone weathers better, and even lasts longer, because it weeps water instead of only absorbing it). The aesthetic, however, is decided in a kind of committee process, involving the architect, the client the master mason and the journeyman (that's me). Take the little section of wall pictured (I think twice) above, it's actually a mock-up sitting in our shop in Richmond waiting for approval. My task was to create tight joints which carried up the face and the top of the curb wall, and which didn't turn out square. I had to pick, or chizel into shape, square-face stones with complimentary triangular backs and join them together to get the joint pattern you see along the top. It takes forever (the five stones pictures took a combined 5-6 hours of work) and is kind of fun, but ultimately I'm only doing it that way to make an architect and a client who are looking for something vaguely "japanate", happy. Can you imagine how unsatisfactory your poem, or your playscript or your character portrayal would turn out if you were shooting for something "japanate" (that's actually a real term in architecture, used a lot in California)?

But the rub is, I actually like the way that mock-up turned out. I also like the things we've installed at that property, with a few exceptions of things I didn't picture. I like looking at the work at the end of the day, when the stone dust is hosed off and the joints are all tucked and hidden. On these residential jobs, the moment of the end of the very last day, when all the tools are packed on to the truck and all the construction debris (which is a giant, ungodly environmental catastrophe I participate in constantly and am more and more sickened by- concrete manufacture and curing alone accounts for something like a quarter of global warming), at that moment, the work ceases to be mine and I never get to see it again. That's a very strange experience, different from the one where you bind a book and put it on your shelf or hand it to people and then you come back to the text a month or a year later and say "did I write this?". The interesting exception is the public works I've been a part of, which include the Aids Memorial Grove (SF), The Lower Falls Entrance (Yosemite), Stern Grove (SF) and a few others around the Bay Area. With those projects, I can come back and visit and recount the whole process and all the labour and then look at how they are used and its a little like listening to an album you've finished with a friend- you get to experience their version of it along with your memory of its creation. That's kind of cool, and I'm tempted to say that if I only ever had to work on public jobs, I'd give myself over entirely to masonry.

But my constant excuse for not doing that yet is that masonry destroys your hands. Even as i type this, several of my fingertips send little shocks of pain back to my brain reminding me of cracked cuticles and bruised tips from working in the rain around sand and mortar all week. But I could still work with them- I could still pick up a trowel and sling mortar, as I've done with a broken finger and a missing nail and many other injuries. I could still do it until the day my body gives out entirely, just like every other mason out there. But I couldn't come home and play mixed sixteenth note triplets and seven stoke rolls, couldn't type for more than a half-hour before my back tells me to go lie down. Which I think also means that none of us can reply to administrative e-mail, write cost reports, produce ad copy, edit bad (or even good) manuscripts, or any of the other various and sundry economic activities which impugn upon us and then also get very much of the work we are inclined to call our creative work done. It is only in the caesuras from those other works that we get "our work" done, and it is this relationship that I am constantly butting up against lately- for the simple reason that there doesn't seem to be any caesura at all anymore.

Jenn's post reminded me that I want to hold a chapbook party. Everyone brings enough copies for everyone else at the party, exchanges happen. We all get a lovely library of original art. Maybe in January? Sound like fun?

As to whether book 17 is art or just book 1, I'd have to say that all the books are equally part of the process. Nevermind the fact that the numbering is an imposed system well after most of the work has been done. I think part of the bookmaking is standing at the press and cranking it fifty times in a row just to get one page spread. And then while your shoulder starts to hurt, setting up the next spread, or breaking down type, or checking to see if the ink is dry yet, or moving the leaves around the studio to keep out of the way of other artists. I'm not sure the reader can see all of that when they pick up the chapbook, but it's there in every impression.

I really haven't much else to add. It's been a long week. It's been a long season. I'm off to the mountains in a couple days; maybe I'll be a lot more productive there.

No collaborative meeting (cancelled for Chanukah), but a few weird ideas.

Jazz records used to always, and sometimes still do, come with critical essays for their liner notes. That, along with a few black and white shots from the studio (if it wasn't a live recording) constituted the entire packaging. Fast forward today, in the post-rock world, and liner notes are replaced by "packaging" a weird hybrid of lyrics, shout-outs and designy stuff created by either artist, the marketing department, or some unholy marriage of the two. I was thinking a minute ago, whill practicing drums in my office closet surrounded by all my old cassettes, that liner notes, or album packaging, or whatever you call it, is still something people read. Why don't we use this as a space for texts more interesting than thank-you lists and song lyrics. WHy don't poets start writing liner notes? Specifically, how 'bout we poets team up with any musicians we know who has a record coming out and offer to write, as a kind of miniature chapbook, the liner text. Like the professioinal critics who were brought in to contextualize the album and give listeners more to relate to, professional poets could add new dimensions to the experience of sitting down with liner notes.

Other than that, a few scattered notes on chapbook poems, and, oh yeah, placed a few 3-ton boulders in someone's backyard. When I have the energy, I'll solve the tech issues for getting a few shots of stone work up and maybe a brief discussion on whether it's art or not. Curious form Jenn, or anyone else, is making book number 17 making art, or is it only type-settingl and designing the first one that's art. Also, anyone else- can you satisfy yourself as a creative person even if you don't do "you art"? Maybe I should have given this subject more thought when I started the crazy blog.

Yesterday was a loss- this morning finishing notes/draft for a rehearsal script of the collaboration Study 2013. After work, meeting with collaborators, so, probably more to say later on.

Also, really wondering the last few days why I'm so strict about not considering the things i build in stone art. Is it the fact that, the minute I'm done with them, someone else owns them? The fact that I have a blue print in front of me? I never mean to get into the question "what is art?", but I am finding it strange that I have such a strong theory in the negative.

I'm going to post a few shots of what I'm making in the next few days and let you all decide.

My creative work tonight began with rubberbanding (see reply to Dillon's post) my work from this semester and cleaning my desk/clearing thought space for over-break thesis work and reading.

I finished reading Vera & Linus by Jesse Ball and Thordis Bjornsdottir, which was a fun read, but also thesis related in its regard for fragmentation and the unsaid. It was a fantastically fun book, if you're up for a game of hopscotch followed by some light-hearted bloodletting. This is meant as a good thing.

Today I went to Juliana Spahr's and we talked about my thesis while people cleaned her floors. Very productive--both for me and her floors. She has, of course, added to my already too long reading list, and so...

I'm going to go pick a new book and begin...

(Also, last week, I finished printing my chapbook and have bound 40 of the 70 that I made. Send me your address & you'll get a book).

Some work on Project 2013 today.
No work on chapbook. Too tired to practice instruments- not really feeling like being a stone mason this week, but also not having lots of choice in the matter.
Loretta is reminding me that I'm sitting on a huge body of work about Oakland, including some of hers, which I meant to revisit sometime after I returned from Scotland.Should do that soon

A boozy lunch at the office Christmas party and something about the "jewel of Oakland."

The lake is a slough is a tidal estuary, and it once formed the basis for the city of Oakland's sewer system — quite Modern and Hygienic! — the lake is ringed by lights and joggers and Canada geese, the occasional pelican. The lake is ringed by hundred-year-old houses framed in redwood cut down in the hills where eucalyptus now grows. The lake is the country's first wildlife preserve, established in 1870. The lake is a mirror, reflecting the lights of the buildings downtown, turning the city's gaze back on itself. The lake is a slough is a tidal estuary, and most of the city's run-off still passes through it.

So it's not part of the climate change series, at least, I don't think it is. Maybe it's part of that burgeoning body of work — Writing About Oakland. I hear all the cool kids are doing it.

We should have a cheering section in Artist's Daily Almanac- yeah Loretta, you got something done. As for me, I spent the entire day running domestic errands and filing loose pages from 7 years of academics- Walter K. Lew took up 3 binders alone.

Things that are moving. Study 2013, which I think is getting renamed (I'll keep you posted) got a spot in a series called Pilot, which as the title suggests, lets you preview a segment of a piece to an audience with the possibility of being "picked up" for a full scale production. The real boon is that we get rehearsal space as we prepare for the initial showing (sometime in April 07, I think). That's a major perk, as our conversations have centered a lot around blocking and conceptualizing the space. I'm supposed to produce a rehearsal script/plot to start the dancers working this week- wish me luck.

As for other projects: nothing gong on the chapbook, except for a scribbled start on a poem for Art Blakey. No music to speak of. Good conversations with Chris Strofolino on the subject of music/poetry overlap, causing me to consider proposing a compendium of essays/poems on the subject to some publisher, instead of just my own current study. Maybe something hald from composers who hace worked with text and poets who also compose music (I can think of a more than a dozen in the Bay Area alone).

Oh, and I bought a drum stool which can double as a desk chair, as well as a piano bench, so no more excuses for not practicing instruments,

ciao,

p.s. Stephanie Young was nice enough to reply to the "bookshelf project". My e-mail server is bugging, so I can't reply properly at the moment, but if she's reading- thanks for playing along.

Six pages today, some of it quite rough, but some of it at least has potential.

The orange gathers in on itself, reflecting and intensifying, insinuating, incinerating. They say the heat is on, the average temperature up by one degree in the last hundred years, the sun’s ray trapped and held here like a greenhouse. I guess it’s true what they say about people in glass houses, and but what that means for the man who tended orchids in Malibu, I don’t know. Which is all to say that Arrhenius was right. This time could be better spent capturing methane.

I worry, of course, about political didacticism. In fact, any overtly political poem runs a grave risk of polemic, and it can be difficult to balance. A strategy I have used in the past (with mixed results) was to avoid voicing any sort of opinion and to take refuge in facts. But this project seems to be creeping away from facts. I'm not sure what to do about that.

How truth can look through, the truth of it being both more and less easy to believe, convenience being uppermost in our minds. Rain again Tuesday, and a break in the rain. And the sky is dark as violence, a shattered mirror, the canvas painted thickly, the shapes disoriented, distracted, uncertain of the horizon, a jagged edge, blackened and soot-stained. He says it’s time to be prepared, stocking up on water and food and shotgun shells, the wind-up radio slash flashlight he got for his birthday.

I am writing this in anticipation of having a lot to report later today. This is the first day I've had to myself in about two weeks. All my time has been taken up with my freelance editing jobs or with this apartment renovation project, and all this has my boyfriend and I driving each other mad. OK, mostly I'm being difficult and crazy and irritable; so he's being sweet and leaving in a few minutes and I will spend the day writing and thinking about writing and eating leftover Thai food and I may not shower or get dressed until tonight.

I hope I will have good news to report.

I can only seem to blog on progress towards being able to get some work done. Last time I got my piano in, which is still dirty and in need of a tuning, now I can report book shelf fully stocked once again, and internet connection (woohoo!). Here's an idea for a simple project I might just follow through on. I'm going to e-mail a random sampling of authors on my shelf, whosever e-mails i can get a hold of, and tell them who they sit next to on my shelf. Here's one to Stephanie Young:

Dear Stephanie,

Did you know your anthology and your book from Tougher Disguises sit right next to each other on my book shelf. That's because I alphabetized volumes of poetry by author, but anthologies by title, thus "Young"-"Bay Poetics". I wonder if that will create voodoo that turns you into a narcissist. Probably not. Next to yourself, you are also next to "The Notebooks of Araki Yasusada", which I wasn't as interested in as I thought I would be. I think Yasusada is Japanese for, "ill-advised literary experiment", but no one reading it in English got the joke. Next to next to you is "Best American Poetry 1993". Can you believe I have that? What's even worse is that I've moved it three times and haven't thrown it away. How embarrasing.

I wonder how many other people have Young touching Young on their shelf. Probably only people who meet these conditions:

- read contemporary poetry
- are anal retentive
- don't own any Zukofsky

Anyways, I'm just sending this note to you because I plan on sending an e-mail out to every author I can think of telling her or him who she or he sits next to on my bookshelf. By the way, do you have an address for Mark Twain?

Shame on me, oh infrequent blogger.

I have spent night after night binding in the really cold studio--in 3 shirts, coat, scarf, gloves with cut-off fingers. But I have chapbooks.

Now I need to start compiling a list & mailing. Get the damn things out of my hands. (Which also means that if I don't see you regularly, you should email me your mailing address).

And today I received my theory papers back after much anticipation over a not-so-organized professor and took a deep breathe again.

I am looking forward to the break. I have stacks of books. I have an idea of a new section of my thesis maybe. That I thought the entire thing was going to be the longish series that I've been working on, but perhaps it will only be one of a couple or few sections (still likely the longest section). The adventures of marie&marie -- which started from --


It has been three days and I cannot find the box I fit in last year--Marie & Marie have gone dancing, and she asks if it makes me uncomfortable.

I am smaller now. Instead violence and dishwashing are up, and I think perhaps its wrong of me to say you are material, that your mouth is material, though I'm sure you'd understand my distaste for dirty dishes. Marie says anything. I do not understand the question. We have made our reservations and she goes looking for something to wake.

I promise to let you know what I'm reading.

Sometimes I really hate office jobs -- all the silly politicking that goes on, the power struggles about stupid shit, the selfish demands. For example, because one vice president refuses to use his office email account, and because a couple of his emails didn't get delivered to other people at the office, he insisted the system's spam-blocker be turned off, which means everyone in the office is getting crazy amounts of spam. On the plus side, I got the following subject line in my inbox and had to write it down (on a post-it, no less):

and I may come; against it: upon the day that

In the last four days, the only art I've made is a half hour drum solo in the middle of packing up my room at the Creamery. other than that, I've been doing 18+ hour days of moving/cleaning and now back at masonry. I'm only able to write this because I;m at my desk in my faculty office in Santa Cruz, picking up student finals (and apparently not picking up my paycheck, because they screwed it up yet again- bastards! Next time you see a UC Regent on the street, kick him/her in the shin).

Up shots, moved, with the help of intrepid friends, my piano into the new apartment. Time to start practicing, and eventually composing again.

My kitchen is orange. That was the weekend's big accomplishment. And when I say orange, I mean intensely, aggressively, like-the-fruit orange. I think I like it, and when the afternoon sunlight fills up the room and bounces off the walls I find it almost overwhelming.

We have been in the very slow process of painting our apartment, going from renters' white to these really bold, bright, vegetative colors. When it is finally finished (after the holidays), I'm hoping to have a house reading/party to celebrate.

Once again, a back-dated post at 1am. Closing two chapters of the life department- last class of the quarter today, and packing to move out of The Creamery tomorrow. The second has some direct bearing on the art life, as it was supposed to be a major godsend in terms of mounting performance pieces regularly and at zero cost. For those who aren't familiar, the Creamery in West Oakland is a live-work space that inludes two (at least two) performance rooms as well as a bar, a gallery area, a recording studio-in-progress and various other unbelievable perks which, alas are in too much disrepair and under the sway of too many people's whims (did I mention it also has rooms for 17 residents?) to make it workable at the moment. If I have any concrete "goals" in my life it, they begin and end at owning a building like this (if there is anything "like this" anywhere else at all). Ah well, que sera.

Had a two-hour plus meeting with dancer/collaborators on Study 2013 that was very scattered but also very generative. I've come in some sense to be the person the group relies on to articulate the budding plans. The whole process is very interesting and inspiring, because no one has decided to go off and create the piece while nayone is gone, but instead we do it almost all in discussion between colaborators. This process is both frustrating, because little happens between meetings, fascinating, because every idea is immediately interpreted by a group.

I'll give you a peek at some of the notes i took today:

'an interrogation of the notion of The End Times- not simply that we interrogate it and report results, but that we perform an interrogation in which the audience is implicated, or even co-participant.

Abby: we need some text, some movement, some music.

Ava: Interest and audience participation- ways that aren’t intrusive, which lead them organically into a place they wouldn’t otherwise have gone.
-Simple methods: the audience has to walk to follow performance, the audience can change their perspective to see the piece.

Ideas: use concentration/dispersion of audience to represent global change (also cued by audience answers to questions).

Your positioning i relevant to your answers to questions.

Obscuring vision (scrims, etc.).
Ability to see other groups, their reactions

many events happening in various degrees of visibility, which slowly come to focus. movement cues start to coordinate. a cause at location A becomes registered effect at location B, tighten the chain so that it’s obvious.

deconstructed space-v-guided space

what about a 20-min. loop (“like a haunted house”), where

stage 1: interview
stage 2: apocalypse
stage 3: reality, with a plant to remind us of part of the piece

“The lesson is that the Aocalypse is always just a chance- how do we live with it”.

from Dhira’s exercise:
“NPR
Kresge
help
challenge
“ah-vee”
Scott
I
AIDS
meet
cities
this
AIDS”

can we make a movement from dispersion to concentration (of the audience) and atomization to cohesion (of the information)

force entrances

For me: create a rehearsal script.'