Look On Down

Amplifier feedback haunted
hums
A sudden avalanche of aching
rises
Goodbye
...goodbye

A lonesome organ plays
the smell of rain
and
cold autumn air

Goodbye
...goodbye

A determined hand pressed against a glass
A heart full of sand
Quick
Be still

Maybe we'd
still be

Slide guitar
her voice like smoke
disappearing
sliding
away
and back
again

Small grainy castles on a shore
a swelling moat surrounds
The spilling of seas
wash over
ashore
good tidings, turned bad
moon rising
pale and scarred and so full and
far
away
and back
and away
again

Goodbye
...goodbye

Waxing
waning
always never
together ever
becoming
unbecoming

light and shadow

Nearby, a bridge
Two feet
a ledge
below, the water
shines, waves
waits...

MoMA Mia

Yesterday, on a whim, I went to the SF MoMA. I woke up, showered, and could tell by the breeze from my open window that it was a lovely day, so I quickly dressed and grabbed my sunglasses to catch the bus downtown. As I walked from the bus stop to the museum I marveled at how much the architecture of the city has changed in the seven years that I've lived here. Many modern looking apartment buildings have been erected. In any direction you can see construction cranes building still more of them. San Francisco is a desirable place to live, and one need only visit it once to see why. People are friendlier, more relaxed than their east coast counterparts, and the weather, usually, and especially at this time of year, is beautiful. A new skyscraper is being built, called the Salesforce Tower. I'd heard, at an art show I'd attended on Friday night, that once completed the building will be the tallest in California. Looking at it from the street near the MoMA it seemed somehow out of place, as though it might fit better on Dubai's skyline than San Francisco's. That's not to say the building is unsightly or without charm; far from it. It appears taller than it is wide, and it tapers slightly as it rises, like a giant shampoo bottle made of glass.

Upon entering the museum, after purchasing a ticket and being ushered into an elevator, I pressed the button for the seventh floor so that I'd work my down instead of up. And as fate would have it, the seventh floor turned out to be stellar. Directly in front of the elevators was a little room full of small, sound-making machines made of wood, string, motors and metal. They functioned on a timer so that together they'd create a quiet symphony of oddly mechanical sounds which, on their own were not necessarily musical but, when heard in concert would produce an oddly pleasing song. The exhibit reminded me of something Da Vinci might have conceived. Passing through the room, on the right side, I noticed a darkened hallway and, moving away from the crowd, I headed in that direction. Because of how dark the path had been, traversing the space became very disorienting, causing me to have to shorten my gait and step cautiously, as to avoid losing my footing or colliding with another person, but when I entered the almost lightless room I saw only a faint spotlight illuminating an amplifier. The space was completely empty, or, at least seemed to be; as best as my adjusting eyes could tell. Within a second, a microphone swung into view and almost kissed the speaker. As it did, it produced a brief but beautiful hum of deep feedback distortion before swinging pendulously back into the darkness. Somewhere there must have been another, hidden speaker, one which played the soft music of harps and falsetto female vocals. The singer sang in a language I couldn't understand, which gave the scene an even more surreal feel. The piece, by Camille Norment, was ingeniously minimal, using a natural motion to make a vaguely percussive sound, and utilizing the absence of light to force attention to the hypnotic sway of the microphone, it lulled the viewer into melodic contemplation. What forced me to leave was the distracting sound of people whispering loudly in the dark and remarking on how "eerie" it was.

Next was a German art exhibit from the post world war era. All of the works were moving, but especially impressive was the work of Anselm Kiefer. One gets the impression of his canvas being slowly steeped in the color of desolation. Using a palate colored by mud, ash, soot and smoke and lead, he evokes a strong sense of aftermath. Constantly the work made use of ruined landscape, smoldering haze, and barren lifelessness, as though moments before viewing, whatever scene he'd meticulously crafted had been bombed into rubble. One piece, depicting what looked like a bathtub placed close to the foreground, showing an endless expanse of razed fields as its backdrop, had beside it a small placard explaining how the tub symbolized a German desire to clean their history of the atrocities of war. Sigmar Polke also had several powerful pieces. At what seemed like fifteen feet tall, they towered over you. When apprehending the paintings you got the feeling of looming tragedy, with such intensity that, at any moment, an avalanche of dust and sand might break loose from the wall and undo you. I couldn't help but think of Flight of The Valkyries as I stood in front of the panels. I cannot remember to which German artist the next sculpture belonged, but it depicted a fighter jet as a kind of fallen angel. It lie on the floor, charred and half crumpled, crucified, impotent and unable to fly, burdened by a container of ash atop its left wing. It seemed to suggest the godlike power of technology and how it would have to reckon with the wrath it inflicted, and the life it stole.


And while the other floors housed fantastic sculpture, beautiful paintings by Morris Louis that resembled ghostly smears of colored streetlights seen through foggy windows, and an entire floor dedicated to the photography of Walker Evans, still, I felt the final exhibit of the seventh floor was the strongest. It was a piece by an Icelandic artist named Ragnar Kjartansson, hidden behind the elevators. Inside the room were perhaps ten movie screens, each showing a different musician playing a song; a man in a bathtub with a small acoustic guitar, two pianists, two electric guitarists, a cellist, a drummer, a chorus, and female singer with a high-pitched Icelandic accent. I entered the room midway through the performance, as the lyric "there are stars exploding all around you and there's nothing you can do," was being sung, screamed, by almost all of the musicians as the song began to crescendo. All of the museum goers in the room, some of whom were sitting crosslegged on the floor, seemed to smile, spellbound, relishing in the delightful magic of the composition. At first glance it seemed that the musicians were located in various places throughout the world, all living in a lavish sort of squalor; as though a wing of the Palace of Versailles had been annexed and repurposed as hostels for poor poets, singers, songwriters, and they'd let it fall into light disrepair. It struck me as strange that the artist would travel or ship these container rooms all over the world, but stranger things have been done in the name of art. As the piece neared its end though, it became clear that they were indeed all in one place when the musicians began walking off their screens and appearing on another performer's. To watch the excitement on the faces of those around me as they scampered to their feet to cross the room and watch the work unfold from screen to screen was awesome. By this time, all the musicians had converged on a single screen and had marched out of the mansion to greet the coming sunrise, or sunset, acoustic guitars in hand, as they continued to yell and sing their song while vanishing into the distance.

I hadn't realized how large the crowd was until I saw everyone standing in front of one screen together, unified by the song, like the artists disappearing down into the grassy meadow.

Desert Daze

To look at, Joshua Tree is a perfectly picturesque desert expanse. As far as the eye can see, cacti and twisted Joshua trees litter the dusty ground, which, when one imagines it, is teeming dangerously with scorpions, rattlesnakes, venomous spiders and all sorts of slithering lizards. But it isn't really. Sure, we saw the occasional lizard, a bee or a beetle here or there, but nothing especially harmful. We ate and drank and smoked all the harmful things; beer, liquor, psilocybin mushrooms, pot, and festival-stand chicken tikka masala (which, it turns out, was an explosive hit in the portapotties).

From the path where I arrived, I could see tents strewn about the camp grounds like colorful anthills. In some places there were RV's, retro-fitted buses, Volkswagon camper vans and an assortment of other hippie homes lightly sprinkled with desert sand. As you could imagine, the sky was cloudless, and so the morning was fiercely hot, and getting hotter. As I trudged along on foot, not knowing where the path would take me, or how long it would be before I found my friends, I stumbled directly into our campsite. Paul, the tall, bearded, RV ringleader of our circus clan, gave me a haggard smile and a hug. Everyone was just waking. Because of a flight delay and an earlier-than-expected gate closure, I missed the party the night before and instead slept soundly at a Motel 6 nearby the Palm Springs airport. If camping in the desert teaches one lesson, it is that precious little time exists in the space between sunrise and sweltering sleeplessness, for few things are as unforgiving as the desert sun. Though the music generally started at or around noon, most campers hid in the shade sipping on beer for the larger portion of the day, just to wait out the heat. Now there were some intrepid souls who showed up for morning yoga and guided meditations at 7:00am, but none in our group.

The entire three days were to be devoted to psychedelic rock music and the continued pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. To aid in this search, located somewhere on the festival grounds was a magnetic field generator that was said to guarantee good vibes for all. I had read about the purported benefits of magnetic field exposure, how these waves are believed to align the chakras and re-balance the body's energy, and I have to say, it really did feel as though you were part of a positive vibration.

Not everyone had such a blissfully meditative, mind-opening experience, though. An outsider, brought into the group by a strange twist of fate, couldn't shake the dark cloud which hung over him. He was a bit younger than us, from Texas, maybe in his early twenties. I first noticed him as he lingered for a long while around my periphery before sitting down in the chair beside me. Alex was his name. He was of medium to average build, wore a short, shaggy haircut, and had generally round features and sparse facial hair. His eyes had a dejected, broken look about them, and his energy was all wrong; angry, jilted, apart instead of a part of something. Do you want to me leave, he asked me after some silence. In truth, I did. I didn't at all enjoy his company. But it was clear he was having a bad time, so I couldn't say that to him - even though he might have sensed how I was feeling. No, you're fine, I said. Were you guys talking about me, he asked. No Alex, I didn't know you existed until just now. I think I got dosed...twice. Oh yeah? Yeah, it was bad. Well, that sucks. Have some water, sit in the shade. I was in the portapottie before, and I couldn't find my urethra. Yeah, it happens, I told him, sometimes it just slips out like the ink cartridge in a pen. Then I tried to shit, and I couldn't. Have you tried the chicken tika masala from the Indian food stand, it works wonders. All my friends trashed my campsite. Jeez, Alex, you're a downer aren't you? Can you tell us about something nice that happened to you this trip? Well, I just shit. Like, right now? Damn, maybe you should go take a spirit hike or something, find your spirit animal, air out. He smiled vacantly and then stood up to walk away, dung spilling out of his shorts in small, soggy clumps as he trudged off and disappeared into a dense brush of cacti. We heard them snapping and crunching as he went.

On the last day, half of our campmates had left in the early afternoon to get back home, so we stole out into the midst of the music. We were going to see The Allah Lah's, and we were eating a bag of mushrooms like it was trailmix. By midday we'd easily consumed our weight in beer, and we were smoking like chimneys - so much so that our only vape pen would later die of battery failure before nightfall. We made our way through the crowds with a Scottish couple we'd befriended at the bazaar, and took our place for the show beside a bunch of well-costumed people. One girl, tall and blond and wearing brilliantly shiny sunglasses and flared bell bottoms, was joined by her friend who held, at the end of a long stick which he thrusted again and again into the air, what appeared to be a paper mache palm tree wrapped in glow sticks. The entire crowd danced and swayed and boogied, kicking up little puffs of dust in tribute to the psychy, surfy tunes.

We got higher.

The sun had set and a pleasant breeze blew over us sweaty concert goers. We got cooler. Overhead you could see stars. After hopping from stage to stage, listening to music that seemed to get better and better, we arrived at the stage Spiritualized was to play. We got exciteder. In the center of the stage was a giant screen which had projected onto it images of the ocean. A desert oasis. Jason Pierce appeared and was met with a more than encouraging applause. He began strumming the guitar, creating a shimmering sonic texture which he had absolute control over. Never before had I seen an artist so expertly manipulate sound, and with such precision. Music flowed out into the open air and each note gave birth to an ever deepening dimension of sound until the audience was awash in it. During a beautiful rendition of the song "Stay With Me," one of our friends, A., was so entranced, he fell onto the ground and found Jesus. He got spiritualized!

Early this morning, as we cleaned up camp before the sun made our work unbearable, someone realized we hadn't seen Alex since he took off on the Hershey highway the night before. What if he's dead? Has anyone checked his tent? I lent him the tent, and all his stuff is in it. But he isn't? No. We continued getting things together while maintaining a hopeful indifference he might return. Breaking down my tent was an altogether unpleasant experience. Countless barbs of cactus needles had imbedded themselves into the fabric of the tent, and as I rolled it up to pack it away, I got stabbed and poked repeatedly in my fingers and in the fleshy part of my palms until suddenly I heard a rustling from behind the cacti beside me. I looked up and Alex appeared. He was naked, wearing a bone necklace and was covered in odd, brown markings which gave him the jarring appearance of a wild Native American from a cowboy movie. But what caught my attention was his scrotum. It was swollen and full of cactus needles. If I hadn't known any better, I would have sworn he had a hedgehog in a leglock. I watched him as he followed my gaze to his fleshy, purple pincushion.

I found my spirit animal he said, triumphantly. It's the porcupine.

Apocalyptic Picnic

Photographer unknown

Last night Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions played on a hillside winery in Sonoma, in a big barn. Some friends and I drove up to have a sort of night picnic. For a long time I have been a fan of her music, back when I only knew her as Mazzy Star. Her sound shimmers like a slow shaking tambourine, a trembling sitar, or a rasped maraca. With very little, she is able to summon a haunting, distinctly hazy intimacy that is both meditative and textured, existing somewhere between shoegaze, psychedelia and seance.

But halfway through her set, the wind became uncharacteristically stormy, and very dusty. A thick layer of it covered her microphone and glockenspiel, dulled the shine of the guitars. You could even see it in the length of light projected onto the stage. At one point, at the height of an especially powerful performance, as the drums crashed and guitars droned and she blew metal birdsongs out from a dusty harmonica, something unusual happened. I watched on, dumbfounded, witnessing that the harder she blew, and the more fiendishly the band played, the stronger and whiter the wind became, until it was impossible to separate the howling of the wind from the howling of her harmonica. And just as I thought my skeleton might explode under the weight of her song, the electricity cut out. The crowd sighed, then quickly cheered and clapped at the uniqueness of the situation. So heavy was the air with chalk that I wondered if it were really possible to be as dusty as it seemed. “See, San Francisco,” she said, this is what happens when you invite a witch to your town.” Soon the power was back on and they played a few more songs. The three soul singers were lovely, but it was the guitarist who stole the show with his soothing, psychedelic sound. Warm, round tones from his amplifier hung around us as our hearts turned to goopy honey. A demented grin spread across my face as my body seemed to spiral in a brilliant geometric whirl.

As the show ended, the wind grew far more ferocious. Trees began to creak and sway drunkenly around us. Big branches thrashed menacingly overhead. Garbage cans fell over and glass bottles rolled out. Napkins and papers streamed through the air as rocks and dirt kicked up from the ground stung at my eyes while we hurried down the path in the dark. Only a few yards ahead of us, people stood pointing and staring, taking photos of something in the distance. We approached and that's when I saw it. A rippling plume of dark smoke spilling itself terrifyingly across the horizon. And right above it, about to be extinguished by the colossal inky cloud, was an enormous red moon pressed against the stars like a lit cigar. Suddenly the gusts picked up speed and a group of nearby girls screamed as the smoke stole the moon from the sky. We reached the car and quickly took off away from the winery.

Idling at a stop sign, dead leaves swirled and cartwheeled madly over the car. How often do tornadoes touch down in Sonoma, I wondered. When I got back to San Francisco I began to notice, even there, chalky cones of light under the streetlights. From the sidewalks you could smell something was burning. I parked the dust-covered car and stepped out. Small bits of ash were falling down on me. On my phone I saw that a massive, 200-acre fire was burning across Napa and Sonoma. People were being evacuated. Walking, blinking my dry, sawdust eyes, I couldn't help but cough up dust and think of the ash raining down on me in the empty parking lot where I'd left the car. In the distance I heard the sirens of far away fire-trucks. My skin smelled like smoke.

This is what happens when you invite a witch to your town.

The winery where we saw the show has since caught fire, and the affected area, now exceeding 20,000 acres, has been reduced to smoldering rubble. Advisories were put into effect in San Francisco urging people to remain indoors if possible, to avoid respiratory issues that might arise from inhaling the particulate matter from the fires. Even now the air still stinks of campfire. This morning, a thick, sooty haze made a mess of the sunrise as it climbed, wincing and blushing, through mostly opaque ozone. A short while ago that same sun had swollen to five times its normal size, and setting, it hung low in the sky like a great red traffic light. STOP. It gave me a vague sense of unreality which I haven’t felt since back in New York, in the days after the towers fell. Although technically out of sight, and without any overt signs or evidence of hazard, calamity manages makes itself known; in the smell of fire, silence, a solemn sense of thankfulness - that you or your loved ones weren’t claimed, that you still have a place to call home. Misfortune encourages worry. Disaster convinces the mind to stop unsuspectingly turning corners, so that at every juncture you begin to anticipate an encounter with countless dangers, all liable to appear suddenly and with lethal, irreversible force.

Something else though. Bizarre happenings knock loose those hardened blockages inside the soul, alighting the mundane with possibility and relegating tedium, at least temporarily, to the wind. Those resultant sunrises and sunsets are not without beauty, I might add. Even the image of a rolling green vineyard wreathed in flames is not without a certain dark and devastating grandeur. An arsonist's wet dream.