2/12/2022 #52
Here and now, post-reading Saturday, letters, crows, paper cutting, Patria Rivera, Yuge Zhou, Ahmet Öğüt ︎, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, categorization, Stories & Hunter, Harold Lopez-Nussa, GoGoPenguin
HERE AND NOW
Today is the day after my participation in an enjoyable local poetry/story reading, featuring myself, Melissa Smedley, Terese Garcia, and Linda Lay, along with a group of terrific singer-songwriters. The event was sponsored by the Monterey Museum of Art and Captain + Stoker Coffee Roasters, and accompanied the ongoing Courage Within exhibit, also at MMA.
It’s a beautiful, balmy, almost-muggy Saturday, so much so, that I start worrying, just a little, about wildfires. The local Fieldwork Brewery, just down the street from where I live, was packed full of people—like a big party. And who can blame them? We also had a good-sized crowd at the reading last night, and I got the feeling that everyone who was there was incredibly grateful for the chance to be around people at a cultural event.
I felt I should just chill out all day, but around 11 a.m. realized that I need to get to work, as I have a grant to write for the nonprofit I work for, and I also have copyediting waiting for me; during this Tiger (Tyger) year, I have year-long contracts with two academic journals. Time to get out the Kanban board and get cracking.
In the meantime, though, a slightly daunting revelation:
After retrieving from storage the three boxes containing my parents’ letters dated from WWII through the mid-20th c. (for a nonfiction writing project), I realized that the letters are pretty old and taking them in and out of their envelopes is going to cause wear and tear. So, I will first have to digitally scan each letter and sort them by date (among other things). This is going to be a bigger project than I first imagined.
So glad that my partner, who seems to have a natural grasp of archival processes, jumped in right away with an offer to help; I really appreciate that. And then, of course, there will be the writing part, hopefully. But I will have to get the letters in order, first. As I thumbed through the envelope addresses (still haven’t read any letters), a few tantalizing clues float up to me; like—hmm, I didn’t know my mother lived in Parañaque during the WWII. According to one report, it was Manila’s “guerrilla district” during the war—which makes sense because both my uncles were guerrilla fighters (many of the “Hunters ROTC” at that time were volunteers living in that district).
My curiosity has been stirred . . .
White jasmine starting to bloom on the lattice fence outside.
Hazy rafts of cirrus clouds drift across the sky.
The Australian longleaf wattle bush in our yard, perhaps mistaking this California winter heat to be Australian summer, is suddenly displaying a tremendous spurt of growth, stretching its branches and pink-tipped leaves out in all directions.
The male crows caw and the female crows (in a certain mood) rattle.
ART
Not much in the way of visual art right now.
I love buying stuff, especially art supplies. Though, on a limited budget, my buying sprees are limited to thrift stores and art supply stores. I was getting set to purchase some mixed-media paper in various sizes, when I realized that odds and ends of paper, cardboard, and drawings that I don’t like are piling up right here in my studio area; so, why not cut them to the sizes I want and create my own stock of paper? “Failed” drawings can be recycled for collage or whatever. So, I’m sharpening up my Exacto knife. Although maybe it’s also time to get a paper cutter—Ah! I get to buy another tool?
After cutting paper and increasing my stock of drawing surfaces, I feel very productive:
LINKS
Marites Sison interviews Filipina poet Patria Rivera in the Asian-Canadian Observer newsletter (Substack):
Yuge Zhou “ . . . is a Chinese born, Chicago-based artist whose videos and installations addresses connections, isolation and longing across natural and urban spaces as sites of shared dreams.”
Ahmet Öğüt, founder of the “Silent University,” learned to make art while being nomadic. ︎
“I grew up in a place where civil war was part of daily life, where safety in public space was divided into day and night, into wide roads and back streets, mountains with cages or fields with burned trees. It was normal to have military tanks patrolling in the heart of town with heavily armed Special Forces. Working as a journalist in a newspaper was dangerous enough to have one assassinated in the middle of the street during daytime. Listening to music in your native language was considered a crime.
“. . .Through this withdrawal [from a show in Istanbul] we expressed our fatigue over exhibitions based on national identity, over the utilization of artists as illustrations of politics between nations, and the categorization of artists according to geographical, national, or regional specifications. Besides all this, another disappointing thing was the disparity in the distribution of funds among invited artists.”
See his “Currency of Collective Consciousness.”
What could an exchange economy, not based on profit or debt or accumulation, look like and feel like? “Theorist of Joy” Frances Negrón-Muntaner on her project, “Valor y Cambio”:
I’m interested in her “art of catastrophe” (as opposed to the “art of disaster”). Catastrophe as “a moment of overturning.”
“For me, the most compelling art practice is a form of research, capable of opening new questions and ways of being.” — Frances Negrón-Muntaner
Article by Rebecca Jennings on the Internet as categorization machine, which leads to questions about the current polarization and the need for people to increasingly “categorize” (on Vox).
SOUNDINGS
Cover of Adele’s “Go Easy on Me” by Stories and Hunter, with a very relaxed dog. Wish there were songs around like this when I was sixteen.
Two Trios with piano on NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert:
1) Harold Lopez-Nussa trio: Afro Cuban jazz piano:
2) GoGo Penguin:
Until next weekend . . .