Follow the typical signs, the hand-painted lines, down prairie roads.
Pass the lone church spire.
Pass the talking wire from where to who knows?
There’s no way to divide the beauty of the sky from the wild western plains.
Where a man could drift, in legendary myth, by roaming over spaces.
The land was free and the price was right.
      ~ from Gold Rush Brides by 10,000 Maniacs

The bike ride south of Race Street takes you directly to Meadowbrook Park, which has preserved 60 acres of native Illinois prairie, now all but mowed down and turned into the endless soybean and corn fields of the Midwest. But here, in this oasis of tall grass, turned golden in the dessicated air, one can still get a sense of the “legendary myth of the wild western plains” that Natalie Merchant evoked in the album Out of Eden. This tenacious enclave of rural land serves as an interesting space for the modernist sculptures that are displayed along its pathways. The ample size of the pieces are dwarfed nonetheless by the vast openness of the terrain. The pastoral setting ostensibly serves as counterpoint to the curated artifice, but is itself ironically, ultimately, also contrived. There is a heightened nostalgia for pure, unadulterated Nature by the presence of decadent bourgeois art in this patch of prairie preserve.

Cathedral window with a halo or a crown of thorns. Pat McDonald Open 2006

Brontosaurus feeding on primeval flora. Michael Dunbar Niantic 2002

This same artist did Slow and Steady at the Urbana Free Library. Todd Frahm El-Ahrirah 2000

Naked WASP woman of the prairie. The turquoise-green of oxidized bronze looks stunning against the gold of dry grass. Peter Fagan Marker 1998

One of my favorites, these Jazz Age totem poles and talismans. Love the cocked derby hat! D. Bill Folk Art 1997-1998

Surrealist creature. Ed Haddaway From Night Daddy’s Book of Dream 2001

One of the more comical pieces. Love the red and the hammer heads. Ed Benavente Minimal Response III 1999

Fun with Keith Haring iconography. Peter W. Michel Fathers & Sons 1999

A piece difficult to photograph. It was in a shady corner at the foot of a walk bridge, looking suspiciously scatological. Cecilia Allen and Roger Blakley Southern Passage 1998

The piece that most looked like it belonged there. Michele Goldstron Here and There 2000

The sheen of steel, the precision of lines, contrast with its organic environs. Ron Gard Position #1 2006

Another difficult piece to photograph. I like the reference to the sea in the title, the barnacled texture of the phallic head, the finned tail. Cecilia Allen Prairie Buoy 2001

Looks very solid and geometrically precise, this fluke. Carl Billingsley Fluke 1998

These wings, the title implies, look earthbound and organic. Endlessly photographable with its late afternoon shadow. Alissa Negila Swift 2001

Perhaps it is my being a chemist that makes me blasé about this piece–or that it is really sophomoric, obvious, and dull. Nothing wrong with science inspiring art, done properly. I do like the more inspired ribosomal subunits in glow-in-the-dark colors at the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB). Christiane T. Martens Molecular Reflection 1997

If Transformer robots were made of concrete… Derick Malkemus Striker 1998

Looks like a blow-up of some kitsch decor in a 70’s Miami bungalow. ‘Nuff said. Larry Young Tango 1997

The perfectly smooth sphere, and the prairie background, saves this piece from being an ordinary pile of concrete rubble. William Carlson Balencia 1999

Now this is a pile of rubble. Barry Tinsley Hamilton 2002

Another comical piece. Its levity is counterbalanced by the chunkyness of the metal. John Adduci Yikes 2000

Related Links:

• Wandell Sculpture Garden at International Sculpture Center
• Complete slideshow of photos at my Flickr website

Leaves have finally turned color! I had been waiting for this all summer, not having lived north enough before to see the four-season cycle. The streets are covered in opulent gold and red, and gleam in late afternoon light. Color changes first at the fringes. It is not so much the production of yellow, as the retreat of green–the disappearance of chlorophyll–that light-harvesting molecule that transforms air into the trees’ very substance. Now, it is shutting down operations, one-by-one dismantling its photosynthetic accoutrements, until a mere black skeleton remains of a once dazzling fullness–a naked stick to stand up to winter.

Reds and purples also appear, at the right conditions, as excess sugars of winter hoarding are transformed by light into color. An occult conjunction of moisture and weather, the onset of spring, the end of summer. No two autumns are thus ever alike.

Autumn to me was, for a long time, merely evoked by Rilke’s poems in The Book of Images. Ostensibly religious, these perhaps belong more properly to his earlier monastic and meditative work, The Book of Hours.

“Who is alone now, will long remain so…” This line has always puzzled me. I did not understand why it should be so, that is, until I saw how ice in winter obstructs travel, and thus reunions. Autumn is the time to wrap things up before we are locked into the dead of winter. The restlessness in the poem, evoked by the flurry of leaves, is that before an impending stasis.

This poem is one of my very first introductions to Rilke, and it remains one of my favorites. I remember first reading it in Filipino in Fr. Roque Ferriol’s ethics class. Without being overt as the first (“Lord: it is time…”), it is nonetheless a more steeply religious poem. Falling leaves (“as from withering heavenly gardens”) also embody a metaphysical disarray. Unlike the first poem, however, which ends in a foreboding disquietude (before death?), here, there is a steadying transcendent force: a great Hand that gently catches all the falling. Yet this is not made out of any rational assurance; the last stanza rather states a beatific inversion that can only be uttered from the depths of religious experience.

Related Links:

• Why Leaves Change Color

My new MacBook Pro came with a free iPod Touch with the academic discount. (Well, what amounts to the value of an 8GB model anyway–I had to fork out the difference to upgrade to 32GB.) The much touted unibody indeed looks sleek: the edges seem precariously razor-sharp, I get goosebumps when I run my fingers over them; the microphone and LED lights that indicate battery life are mere pinhole perforations, they’re almost invisible; the ON/OFF switch fits snug and flat in its hole, it looks like it was drawn there with a draftsman’s pencil. It looks as clean and keen as IM Pei’s National Gallery (East Wing) at Washington, DC.

Source: Ezra Stoller, The Architect’s Newspaper

This attention to design, perhaps more than its OS X operating system, is the main reason I lean towards Mac. I loved my old 12” Powerbook G4, and did not understand why Apple dropped the size, when, for a time, only 15” and 17” were offered. I did not want to lug a tray around, and almost considered getting the black MacBook. It was a good thing I hung on–the 13” MacBook Pro is exactly what I wanted: sleek, silver, and slim. For a short time, this body type and size was offered as a MacBook. Why Apple did that again boggled me; it only confused/diluted the Pro (Powerbook) brand, and would only alienate customers who bought it before it was upgraded to Pro.

Knock on wood that I don’t dent this unibody. I’m sure Apple would ask a pound of flesh for its repair. This is the problem I have with Apple: when you buy their products, you sign away your soul to the Corporation. They are fiercely proprietary and exclusive, exerting control over the product even after your purchase. I spent $400 to replace the optical drive on my G4 that can only be repaired with original parts in an Apple-certified shop. Customer service wanted me to spend “a bit more” to buy instead a new computer. (This was the time they phased out the 12” model.) No thanks. I didn’t like being bullied into buying. When I wanted to buy the iSight for the G4, they just so happen to have discontinued it to pave way for newer models with built-in camera. Customer service dismissed my complaint by saying that Apple “can’t keep on supporting older models”. My G4 was barely 2-years old at the time. There were no third-party Firewire cameras around, and the prices on used iSight cameras soared at eBay. Appealing to Apple is like talking to a brick wall, the Corporation is as veiled and draconian as a politburo, as self-contained and monolithic as the products they sell.

Take their recent row with Google, for instance, over the Google Voice app. Apple rejected the app because

[it] duplicated the core dialing functionality of the iPhone… [by appearing] to alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail. (The Apple Blog, 21 Sep 2009 and Apple Answers the FCC’s Questions).

What harm is it to me as a consumer to replace the native iPhone interface for a potentially improved one, or revert back if I don’t like the Google Voice product after all? Apple does not seem to have the same problem if I run Microsoft Windows on the Mac; in fact, OS X 10.5 comes bundled with Boot Camp precisely to do this.

It is clear that Apple wants to corner the smartphone market by making their product a self-contained, self-sufficient “experience”–something as ubiquitous as Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, a metonym that stands for everything that can fulfill one’s desires, from consumer products to religious salvation. Why else would they collude with a singular service provider (AT&T, formerly Cingular) and not let different companies compete for the business? This, to me, makes them suspect, and I continue to resist getting an iPhone, buying from iTunes, and enrolling in Genius, precisely because of this. I do not want my “experience” to be governed by a single Corporation.

Friends, this is clean-up time and we’re discounting all our silent, electric Ubiks by this much money. Yes, we’re throwing away the bluebook. And remember: every Ubik on our lot has been used only as directed. (from Ubik, Ch. 1, 1969)

When I synced my spanking new iPod Touch with iTunes for the first time, the first thing it did was to tell me that the operating system needed an upgrade, and that Apple was selling it for $10. What?!? This damn thing just arrived in the mail–the wrappings are still strewn about. Customer service told me that the new OS 3 had not yet been released when my stock shipped from their warehouse (somewhere in China, from the tracking info). I hope the smart people at Apple realize how ridiculous this stock statement sounds to their customers. How in the world could I have known what version of the operating system is installed in the stocks at their warehouse? Well, according to customer service, I need not upgrade to the newer operating system, the old one would do just as well. As a customer, this only left a bad taste in the mouth. It was as if I was sold something OBSOLETE, when I was buying brand new. Apple, however, would not budge; they know they can nickle-and-dime cult members.

I was not aware of the Kindle hoo-ha until I read this piece by Nicholson Baker from the New Yorker: A New Page, Can the Kindle really improve on the book? I was dissuaded before I even considered buying one, and felt sorry for the unfortunate owners. What disturbs me most about this product is that it would put me (i.e. my reading experience) under the mercy of Amazon forever. The text format is not open and non-standard; it can’t even read pdf files–only those that one could buy from Amazon. This in itself raises a red(-white-and-blue) flag of… monopoly! No thanks. I’ve already learned my lesson in dealing with Apple. Second, because only the Kindle device can read this text format, Amazon would have absolute Stalinist control of one’s use and right to the text. This is fine for consumers of chicklit or techno-thrillers who toss the paperbacks after reading. As a true bibliophile, I love the embodiment of books on my shelf (not least because they look sumptuous together), and resist the idea of warehousing them in some virtual space to be accessed by an anemic device. But see, even those who bought the lifeless versions of their magazines and newspapers on Kindle were up in arms when they were swindled access to their purchases on the upgraded devices.

I recently discovered two apps for the iPod Touch that allows me to read books: Classics (free until recently) and Eucalyptus ($10). The latter gives you access to more than 20,000 public domain books in Project Gutenberg–that’s more books than I need for all the flights I will ever take in my lifetime. I don’t have to give Amazon a buck for Moby Dick–it’s free. I can virtually flip the pages too (Classics adds a warm rustling sound); they don’t eerily appear and disappear on me. I tested the reading experience with these apps for what Jeff Bezos’ calls the “flow state”–the ability to get lost in the text that Kindle aims to reproduce. To begin with, such turn of phrase sound like gimmicky self-help mantra than some real idea. (Hear Bezos get excited about it in Charlie Rose. Doesn’t his affected chuckle make him seem sketchy?)

The first ebooks I read were, appropriately enough, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, the volumes being slender enough just to test “the flow”. (The metaphor of the looking-glass for the iPod’s touch-screen did not escape me either. How affected!) It was not hard to get lost in the text, owing more perhaps to Carroll’s engaging stories than the whiz-bang of the interface. What I found remarkable was that I can carry books with me in this small thing that fits in my pocket. I can thus take it to lunch, to the bus on the way to the grocery store, to the toilet break, without the extra burden of lugging a hefty tome and looking like an affected bookworm. I can even steal a few pages while waiting for the lab instrument to finish scanning a sample. What’s more–and this is what trumps Kindle–I can listen to the audiobook along with the text. This is particularly helpful with Joyce’s Ulysses, which I am reading at the moment. The rousing performance of Jim Norton makes the work come alive, and adds, not only to the meaning of the text, but to the enjoyment of the reading experience, especially to one who is unfamiliar with the twists and turns of Joyce’s Irish. Ulysses ceases to be the opaque, intimidating, “literary” text it has been made out to be.

In the war for control of the world’s Knowledge (e.g. between Amazon and Google), it is inspiriting to encounter the Eucalyptus reader. It works on the common ASCII text format–it does not claim exclusivity–but presents itself only, truly, as an e-text reader. It is truly in the spirit of the inventor of the movable type, in the way it disseminates and democratizes the text. Amazon, on the other hand, wants to enslave you to their device. (What has Bezos got in his pocketses?) I will stay away from the Kindle like it’s some baleful Elvish ring.

This is how these portraits were made. I photograph my subject against a sheet of white paper about nine feet wide by seven feet long that is secured to a wall, a building, sometimes the side of a trailer. I work in the shade because sunshine creates shadows, highlights accents on a surface that seem to tell you where to look. I want the source of light to be invisible so as to neutralize its role in the appearance of things.

…

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. My concerns are not his. We have separate ambitions for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my need to plead mine, but the control is with me.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or a fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

…

These disciplines, these strategies, this silent theater, attempt to achieve an illusion: that everything embodied in the photograph simply happened, that the person in the portrait was always there, was never told to stand there, was never encouraged to hide his hands, and in the end was not even in the presence of the photographer.

(Richard Avedon, Foreword, In the American West, New York, Harry N. Abrahams, 2005)

I missed this Avedon exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth from 15 Sep 2005 to 8 Jan 2006. I was living in Houston at the time. I saw the Russels and Remingtons there instead on spring break. Amon Carter encouraged and supported Avedon in this project of photographing not “oil barons, ranch owners, and socialites, [but] roustabouts, miners, drifters, and a man covered with bees… [the] working class of America’s supposed classless society”.

The photographs were presented as over-sized, unframed prints up to four feet high and eleven feet in length, amplifying their subject’s presence. According to curator John Rohrbach, “while some critics might read alienation and despair into these portraits [this is not our West!], most of these sitters actually offer no more than benign existentialism”.

An in-your-face sense of proportion.

In The American West originally opened in 1985. In the 1990s, this stark black-and-white portraiture style was appropriated in fashion photography, in the campaign for Calvin Klein’s CK One. This is not surprising given that Avedon started out as a fashion photographer (he was the basis for Fred Astaire’s character in Funny Face). What was startling about the CK One ads was not only that these reproduced In The American West’s photographic style, but also the look, the gestures, the over all working class demeanor of its subjects. Give it to the bourgeoisie to appropriate even the indignities of the poor, make it chic, and commodify it. It is a testament to the resilience of consumer capitalist society that it is able to accommodate all values and lifestyles–even those that normally offend bourgeois sensibilities–through commodification.

How proper then that we recovered this sumptuous copy of Avedon’s portraits of America’s ‘throw-aways’ among the rubbish in our backyard dumpster.

Greasy blue-collar chic. In The American West meets Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory. Pass the deodorant please.

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face

(from Daddy by Sylvia Plath)

30 June 2009. Briefly back in Houston to take stock of stuff I had slowly been sending over in anticipation of finishing my degree and leaving Gainesville at the end of Fall. I did not realize it will take a couple more terms to finally get everything done and find myself another job situation. Needless to say, it has been a long-drawn-out move. My stuff–especially my books–have become what I feared: a ball-and-chain. How liberating it was to have lost all my stuff in a fire five years ago. (Was it that long ago?)

I need to do some long delayed spring cleaning, and kick the habit of desperately hoarding books. Back home, it was rare to find even the likes of Tolkien, Rilke, and Neruda at National Bookstore while I was still in school. Here, there is no reason to hoard; books are a mouse-click away, or, if you live in Houston, they will be at Half-Price Books. My latest haul there: Amy Clampitt’s What The Light Was Like; Seamus Heaney’s Station Island; Goethe’s Faust, Part One (trans. Randall Jarrell); Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante; Camille Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn.

I was surprised that when I was editing the stack of books I wished to bring to Illinois, I stayed away from my stock male poets like Edward Hirsch, Mark Strand, Mark Doty, and Adam Zagajewski, and went for Amy Clampitt (The Kingfisher, What the Light Was Like, Archaic Figure) and Gjertrud Schnackenberg (Supernatural Love)–women poets of dense, complex language. What does this forebode?

In Break, Blow, Burn, “America’s premier intellectual provocateur” Camille Paglia gives “close readings” of 43 poems from her experience as a classroom teacher. (These reviewers make it appear there is a dearth of intellectuals here in the US.) The voice of the text is thus off of a freshman English class–i.e., approachable by a general audience who seek help in appreciating the classics–but also brings to bear the author’s scholarly erudition. The book also appeals to the teacher of poetry, as a superb example of how to make the text come alive in a classroom of even the most indifferent non-literature/-humanities majors. Paglia uses the politically agnostic tools of New Criticism in her readings, but avoids their “genteel sentimentality” with generous helpings of Freud.

By projecting himself into female anguish, victimization and bondage…, the poet [Donne] is playing with transsexual and homoerotic effects.

(from the chapter on Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV from which the title of the book comes)

This kind of psycho-sexual analysis is not surprising to fans of her Sexual Personae. One of the more intriguing readings is, of course, the one of Sylvia Plath’s Daddy. Paglia, true to her reputation as a rogue feminist, gives the poem–the most scathing condemnation of male domination by its most iconic martyr–a rather ambivalent exegesis. While she considers Daddy a “central poem of the twentieth century” (unlike her mentor, Harold Bloom, who generally pans Plath), she also calls out the confessional poet’s extravagant emotional excesses.

To what degree is it justified for Plath, with her comfortable middle class upbringing and privileged education, to appropriate the unspeakable annals of “Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen”? She claims empathetic solidarity with victims of opression… Plath may have had some Jewish lineage… [but] what atrocities did she suffer?

Paglia’s most surprising assessment of Plath, however, is that there is no real literary successor to her unsparing, transgressive poetry–yes, not even those feminists with their “litany of grievances, accompanied by sullen mutterings about patriarchy” (Eve Ensler and her circus troupe?). Her true peers, according to Paglia, are rather in popular music.

I nominate Sylvia Plath as the first female rocker. “Daddy” was written just before rock ‘n’ roll morphed from teenagers’ good-time tunes to content-heavy social protest… The nihilistic wipeout of the last line of “Daddy” is also in the fractious rock spirit: it parallels the smashing or burning of guitars by the Yardbirds, the Who, and Jimi Hendrix, the peak of expressiveness being a destruction of the instrument–in this case the poet herself.

Listening to Sylvia Plath read her late poetry, you can detect the profound change in her voice compared to readings of her earlier work, when she was still married to Ted Hughes. November Graveyard, recorded while accompanied by Hughes in 1958, for example, sounds stiff and academic–the pitch of her voice still seemed girlish, the tone dispassionate, the cadence perfunctory. Was she so overshadowed by Hughes, whose sonorous baritone college girls must have swooned to? In Daddy (1962, she killed herself in ‘63), one can palpably hear her pain. Her voice has become aged, her reading, intimate, raw, and–not unlike the voice of Billy Holiday or Edith Piaf–coarsened by life.