i bid thee farewell

"Walking out from Chekov's 3 sisters -I pass by a puddle that spans far out into the street, i walk through the puddle and like a deep tide pool am plunged into ice cold water, it feels as though there are chards of melting ice- trying to get out of it i am plunged back in several times.
i can hear the play beginning from outside, as i return to my seat.
inside-2 girls, two “sisters” are showing each other gestures, as i make my way back the “sisters” are peeking out into the audience and revealing their costumes. (no recollection)

I awoke to my missing window gushing wind into my room-Shrinking Violet had been racing around full of madness, now purring beside me-the sun was rising and i knew that i'd done it again-i haven't done it in a while- a good while. Something snapped, or something unwound that was wound tightly, and it unwound quickly and chaotically, yet somehow looking back the quickness was slow.

I sign off today-i bid thee farewell-oh how dramatic.... and so it feels, yet also empty -i lay there vacant.

Vacant warehouses with drafty rooms and long halls, that i now find lead nowhere.

(Hand holding was meaningless) Thru my tiny missing window crawled a friend from the past, i was sleeping and didn't realize, i was awake and didn't notice-then a knock at the door and if i remember correctly my hand was grabbed and sliced, cut. This past person was upset with me and passionately so. Cut to next location -With my cut palm i met friends for a dinner and Dan Buran sat across from me-surprised-we ended up in a back and forth and he wanted to know about my bandaged palm. He knows the cutter-We are back in the drafty room. You can hear a car starting outside. Dan talks to me, about what, i am unclear. He says he will return. I laugh-i plunge back into the ice water puddle-

Would i now drive to Venice and knock on Dan's door to see who answers?"

Natalie Woods car & coat

There are black birds hunched in the oleander bushes. As we drive home, we pull up next to a truck with metal bars. Inside, something roars, some caged thing pacing, lashing its tail.

We drive up the canyon under the Hollywood sign. It used to say Hollywoodland like Alice in Wonder or Disney but now it just says Hollywood as in wood of hollys. Or Holy Wood. I think people have tried to leap off of it and die, or is that just in books?






Below the canyon stretches out like an umbilical cord to the belly of the city and up we go past the Spanish-style apartments where the girl got raped last week, some man prowling outside her pink stucco walls while she lay on her bed. Broke the glass. Past the canyon market where I worked last summer, packing bags full of yogurts, avocados, peaches, and wine for the canyon people-the long-haired, junky musicians from My Animal and Shocks and Struts, the beautiful lesbian models Rebecca and Sophie, shaved punk kids, artists in paint-spattered clothes and bone jewelry, film types in cowboy boots and jeans carrying scripts.Past the cafe -they all hang out there too-where Claudia and I drink coffee (mine black, hers sugary and milky brown) and smoke at the window booth with the sun dusting in like some kind of drug we want to put in our noses and mouths and veins.

And up where it winds toward the crest of the hill, past the old stone castles, Spanish villas, Moroccan palaces, gabled fairy-tale cottages-all built for movie stars a long time ago. Charlie Chaplin's house that was a fancy whorehouse after that. And the house where Victoria and her daughter, Perdita, and Victoria's various boyfriends all live. It's covered with hibiscus in front and the blue glass windows must make Perdita feel like she is in some kind of a fish tank.

Tucked in the hills is the lake where the runners circle, passing the rusty metal tubing I have nightmares about, going over the bridge with the carved lion heads and the water below getting sucked down into a whirlpool drain.At the top of the canyon are our two houses-Claudia and her mother, Eva's palace and our house. Both of them under the Hollywood sign looking down over the stretch of canyon to the mother belly city like children attached to an old cord.

We live in a house with a tower. The man who built it was a toymaker; he carved the faces over the fireplace and planted the vines that cover the walls and the oleander in the garden. It smells like cedar and eucalyptus, smoke and lavender in this house. There are things everywhere: books, shells, fossils, dried flowers, bird skulls, the antique wooden cherub, the miniature stone sphinx, ivory monkeys, the brass menorah, china dolls with little teeth, the ancient Roman tear vessel that came from a tomb'-hat looks like a fossilized tear itself; the three bronze women stand erect.

*F.L. Block

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.

Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
- Mark Strand

lace tape

we have it!

*moca art catalogues

Alcatraz

Alcatraz Island is covered with flowers now: orange and yellow nasturtiums, geraniums, sweet grass, blue iris, black-eyed Susans. Candytuft springs up through the cracked concrete in the exercise yard. Ice plant carpets the rusting catwalks. “WARNING! KEEP OFF! U.S. PROPERTY,” the sign still reads, big and yellow and visible for perhaps a quarter of a mile, but since March 21, 1963, the day they took the last thirty or so men off the island and sent them to prisons less expensive to maintain, the warning has been only pro forma, the gun turrets empty, the cell blocks abandoned. It is not an unpleasant place to be, out there on Alcatraz with only the flowers and the wind and a bell buoy moaning and the tide surging through the Golden Gate, but to like a place like that you have to want a moat.

I sometimes do, which is what I am talking about here.

diptyque

Des meubles luisantes,
Polis par les ans,
Décoreraient notre chambre:
Les plus rare fleurs
Mêlant leurs odeurs
Aux vagues senteurs de l'ambre,
Les riches plafonds,
Les miroirs profonds,
La splendeur orientale,
Tout y parlerait
A l'âme en secret
Sa douce langue natale.

Lou

LOU DOILLON
Hometown: Paris
Where do you live? Paris, and a little bit here and everywhere.
What do you do? I live adventures, on films, in theaters, in studios, painting, singing, being a mother, reading, listening, running the house with my son!
What are you working on now? A painting and rehearsing a play for March, and drawing a little fashion line for the French brand La Redoute.
Favorite song: I hate favorites. This week, it’s “Lady Grinning Soul” by David Bowie. Tomorrow, I don’t know.

Favorite artist: The same. Could be Patti Smith, Annette Messager, Dorothy Parker, Bukowski, Schiele. Thank God the list is long!
Describe your personal style. French Revolution meets Joséphine, which meets Millais’s Ophelia, wearing Degas’ tutu, Toulouse-Lautrec’s green stockings, Mary Poppins’s boots, and the Artful Dodger’s top hat, kind of with an air hostess hat.
Who’s the sexiest person that ever lived? Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Where do you see yourself in ten years? In a lab-house in the country with the people I care about, and lots of children.
What’s your hidden talent? They’re all hidden. Talents come out when people take the time to greet them.
If you had to choose between love and independence, which would it be? Love. Actual love is free. Sometimes we forget but true love has nothing to do with dependency. Love doesn’t even have to do with being there. There’s nothing to choose from. You just have to seek the balance and reach for the best in you. It’s hard but I’m proud to love a free man, and I think he feels the same.

Spirit Girls

Marnie Weber
LA-based musician, visual artist, and performer Marnie Weber presents early film work as well as her new 16mm film, A Western Song, featuring a live score performed by the artist’s band, The Spirit Girls. The band, which grew out of Weber’s rock opera The Spirit Girls: Songs that Never Die (2005), follows a group of ghost girls on a fairytale-like journey to find a place to perform their songs and tell their tales. The Spirit Girls will conclude the program with a live set of their moody, surreal music.




Friday, May 25
8pm
The Hammer
10899 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90024

Exene Cervenka at MOCA Art Catalogues

part two

"Is it possible to meet each other or to meet the flower, the bird, or the new day without anything interfering? And if the past does come up, to see that it is memory coming up? And not be ruled by it, not be compelled and narrowed down by it? To see it and to wonder whether it has to interfere?


Whether perhaps there is an energy of meeting, of listening and looking, which can disconnect the belief that we think we know what he, she or it is?"












Like in a mirror
When you are here, bring back your light towards the inside.Form and reflection look at each other
Enlighten the surroundings.
You are not the reflection
But the reflection is yourself
Open your hands and refuse nothing.

tonight- part 1

known sound
After I can no longer see her



she says to me For a while there is all
that asking about how the body becomes
itself as it goes and what it is becoming
what is happening to it where it is going
step by step one moment at a time
and then all that falls aside like a curtain
and the body is gone with its worn questions
hollow joints marrow and breath and instead there is
the way whatever lived in it goes on as itself
neither before nor after neither moving nor still
and while the body was going somewhere
the way was there to begin with in the feet themselves
wherever they went and you know the sound

- W. S. Merwin

Damn good coffee

This just in!....



Dale Cooper: Damn good coffee!

available at MOCA Art Catalogues

Chanel Cruise Los Angeles

Chanel normally uses a different kind of tweed for summer-cruise collections. it's really soft, légère....dreamy....







Chanel Cruise Los Angeles! oui, oui!

Chanel Cruise

afterall books

Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous
Jan Verwoert

Mary Heilmann: Save the Last Dance for Me
Terry R. Myers

Richard Prince: Untitled (couple)
Michael Newman

Also at MOCA Art Catalogues

Bless DVD

Bless
Celebrating 10 Years of Themelessness, video compilation
This DVD features a wide range of Bless’ videos from their archives (1998–2006) for the first time, and documents a unique mode of cultural production in 15 movies. Heralded as one of fashion’s most innovative designers, the Paris and Berlin-based duo (Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag) refuses to capitalize on one milieu. Constantly investigating the boundaries of style, Bless slides from fashion to beauty, interior decoration to art exhibition, collaboration with other brands to stylized advertising. Their production, which sits on the fine line between art object and design, high function and high fashion, is always unique and marked by the recycling and adaptation of unexpected items put to use in a totally new way.
Multizone NTSC, 90 minutes, 2006.

Available at:
MOCA Art Catalogues
8687 Melrose Avenue
LA
310.289.5223

ROCKSBOX

Patrick J. Rock presents...........

Portland? FUCK Portland!

The influence of Oregon on Oregonians...
ROCKSBOX | Portland, Oregon
July 4 - August 17, 2007
July 4, 5 p.m. - 11 p.m. reception


Artists:

Katherine Bovee -Portland, OR

Brenden Clenaghen -Portland, OR

Alex Hubbard -Brooklyn, NY

Jeanine Jablonski -Portland, OR

Joey Macca -Portland, OR

Chelsea Mosher -Portland, OR

P.J. Risse -Brooklyn, NY

Natascha Snellman -Los Angeles, CA

Storm Tharp -Portland, OR

red

pink

love

kate & topshop

Kate poses as a real-life mannequin in one of her dresses at the launch of her Top Shop line at the Oxford Circus store in London on Monday.

Hundreds of shoppers lined up for a sneak peek of Kate’s Top Shop range. Customers were able to try on a maximum of eight garments and were only allowed to purchase five of them.

And customers were only allowed 20 minutes to get all of their shopping done!

The Kate Moss collection for Topshop will go on sale at Barneys in the US on Tuesday, May 8.