Pine Hills Review LOW-LIFE MALIBU (a #poem)

Adventurous lit journal Pine Hills Review is published at The College of St Rose in Albany, New York. 

Pine Hills Review, "Low Life, Malibu" by Sarah Sarai. 

Dig it. And also, the perfect image.“Lunch Break” by Nicole Monroe. That's what life felt like when I was young and shiftless. 

Check out the PHR submission policies for art and poetry and prose. 

The end. (Sorry to be so brief.)

Our Wide Whorl: decaf v. coffee; a friend reads; take art where you find it

A friend of mine is writing a sci fi thriller. She read from its in-process pages yesterday, and to promote her reading did-up flyers, as we do in the age of computers.

And so I realized that even blood spatter patterns are there to be had on Google images. Never occurred to me. Much has not occurred to me and I am not dissatisfied with that fact. The blood spatter images are kind of neat in their abstract airy-ness, however.  I'm not sure if what I saw in my perusal of the flickering pages was the real thing (blood, spattered) or artistic representations.

I believe what you see here is on the artistic side of Dexter, as in representational. Does he, Dexter, blood spatter analyst for the Miami P.D. in a show conveniently named Dexter, express interest in the physics (physics, right?) of spewing red?

My friend's reading was good. Later we all went to dinner where I am pretty sure the waitress gave me coffee instead of decaf, but, hey, I am writing this blog at 2:30 a.m. so when I wake tomorrow I'll have the rest of whatever remains of the day to consider God's whorls.

What's with art anyway...? A morning with N.Y.C. & James Schuyler

Just back from a doctor's appointment followed by a walk across the Park, a stop at stony holy St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue, a decision to walk more later today when it's cooler and thus a bus ride down Lex.

My left hip needs calcium but my superpowered spine grows oddly stronger each year. I'm a medical anomaly. I do Gi Quion (spelling, please) spine twists most nights before bed. My doc. says that's not relevant. She's nice, but feh.

Now home I wait for my fan to rev, something that can take five minutes after I turn it on (pensive is my fan, thoughtful, unwilling to rush into even the most cooling of gestures). Waiting, I read James Schuyler's The Morning of the Poem. This one perfectly captures an urban mix, the joy of art mitigated by the acts of the titans who bought it for us; the pleasure of looking at other people's homes; of being in other people's neighborhoods; street vendor hot dogs. There was wind today for me, too.

Back

from the Frick. The weather
cruel as Henry Clay himself.
Who put that collection together?
Duveen? I forget. It was nice
to see the masterpieces again,
covered with the strikers' blood.
What's with art anyway, that
we give it such precedence?
I love the paintings, that's for sure.
What I really loved today
was New York, its streets and
men selling flowers and hot dogs
in them. Mysterious town houses,
the gritty wind. I used to live
around here but it's changed some.
Why? That was only thirty years ago.

again: From The Morning of the Poem [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976] by James Schuyler

Ray Carver: short stories follow the heart

I loved Ray Carver's work but I had to be won over.

In L.A., in the eighties, I heard an editor from Black Sparrow Books praise his spare, lean prose and remember—quite distinctly—thinking: Yeah, right—spare, lean—load-a-crap. Not long after, I bought Where I'm Calling From—the cover art was so cool—at Chatterton's on Los Feliz, was home by 11 p.m. and didn't go to bed until I finished reading, which, given its slim volume-ness didn't take all that long, I suppose.

But still. I sat in bed turning page after page, marveling at the stories as works of art. I had begun writing short stories and aimed for each to be the equivalent of an Indian miniature or emerald or string quartet. Given that it is now 2009 and I've not had a collection published (though about a dozen have been in review), I don't know if anyone cares about my efforts. If they don't they don't. I have some faith in the market (no faith in the crooks who manipulate it).

A fairly recent New Yorker article set right or claimed to set right Gordon Lish's intrusive editing of Carver, thus making Lish the kingpin of the spare, lean rep. Maybe, maybe not. But Lish wasn't the kingpin of Carver's uncanny ability to tap into the zeitgeist and he was not the one to make palpable American hope and American despair.

Carver did that. His characters are not memorable as individuals. They are a series of husbands and wives who drink and smoke and cheat. Sometimes they encounter the miraculous as in "Cathedral" where a blind man reveals his understanding of gestures of visual art. Or opposite of the miraculous, the chilling, as in“So Much Water So Close to Home,” in which the the body of a young woman is left like a case of beer in a cold river while a group of men have their weekend in the wilderness.

Between the two stories, God is present or God is present in Her absence.

A slew and then another slew of Carver fans have published affective appreciations. So why me, now? Because of Beethoven's late quartets. I heard mention of his late sonatas and remembered something I read in an interview with Carver. He said the late quartets were for the young and the early quartets to be savored in old (relative, of course) age.

And I recalled I was a little embarrassed when I mentioned my trendy affection for Carver to a brilliant journal editor I happened to meet when I was at a summer seminar for secondary educators. This editors discovered new voices and he made great choices. He seemed surprised I was of the masses, with Carver and also with my then affection for The Color Purple, which he perceived not as bad but as mass market and not sophisticated.

Sad truth: Back then more than now but I still struggle to like who and what I like and not think of anyone else, not try to please.

I will have more to say about Raymond Carver. After all, I ruined a great pair of truly sophisticated dark glasses because of him. But that will come on another day. Today I am remembering what is is like to be a fan. I am in the stands and cheering out my heart.

My heart is strong and my cheers are loud.

Roxy Paine: true art, this year at the Met

Last August my nephew, in his last year of college, visited New York. I wanted to show off.

Hence: the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Evan's from L.A., an art center rivaling the Apple (I know New Yorkers tune out this fact. What I can I say but LACMA, the Temp Contemp, the Getty, the Contemporary, Pacific Asia, Huntington, Pasadena Museum of Contemporary Art, Norton Simon, galleries galore - good galleries - and more more more). Like me, Evan had an art-intensive childhood, although more contemporary than mine. Hipper. Some different music, some different visuals, but art all that way.

No matter how much my sister Judy - his grandmother - protested she didn't understand art, her life revolved around art. She reacted to my parents who must have framed the almighty importance of the one true path in strident ways. I don't have an actual memory of this but I'm pretty sure it could have happened - my parents gluing electrodes to our (me and my three sisters') temples during the Bach Beethoven Mozart, Dante, Dickens, El Greco, da Vinci athons.

We Female Four rebelled, but there's no escape from childhood. The classics were implanted. We live our lives as we can (with gratitude and surprising hipness). That said, the classical gene skipped Judy - second daughter - the one who followed valedictorian, full-scholarship-to-Smith, Jean.

One evening, Judy who was by this time married and living in the C.D. (Crenshaw District), was home for a dinner. My father teased her - cruelly - about art, understanding or identification thereof. She went limp and whimpered. I don't understand art. Bullshit. I wanted to deck Pop, but at that point I acted in, not out.

Judy spent the approximately forty of her approximately sixty years breathtakingly entrenched in native, original, indigenous arts and worked with the Smithsonian and other museums. And she wasn't a white lady "mixing." She was something altogether original.

Yeah, right, sure, she didn't understand art. My father knew he was an idiot but he didn't understand how vicious he could be. Or, bless him - he was very funny at times - he couldn't help himself.

So part of my subject here is Jeff Koons, commercial artist. He's okay. He can be fun. Commercial, yup. Nothing wrong with making money. But to be called art - Pop or highbrow - an artist, an artwork, has got to provoke feeling. (Hello, Michael Jackson, provacateur.)

Last year's Jeff Koons sculptures on the Met rooftop provoked boredom - there was no place an imagination could go with them - and Evan saw it right away (which made me so proud of him).

Which brings me to my other main point. Roxy Paine sculptural installation Maelstrom on the Met's roof this summer. Through his twisted silvery branches reaching bending looping joining pipes and disappearing into the floor, there are the blues of sky, shapes of cloud, the thousand greens of Central Park treetops.

After I saw the Paine I ran into a curator escorting a dignatary. I said:

Thanks for putting real art on the roof this year.

She was all Ivy League cool and true art-lover intrigued. Who'd we have, I don't remember. I reminded her. Oh. She looked away.

Can't wait to bring Evan to the roof this year. My nephew will take one look. My nephew will know what too many fail to see. Art isn't a chia pet.

I can't wait until Evan comes to N.Y.C. He'll take one look and he'll know.