American eclipse

Shoshoni, Wyoming--there's a kind of beauty to downtown Shoshoni, the kind artists and documentarians like to walk around in, not only to feel what the past must have felt like to those living in it but also to feel what the future might become. The buildings themselves are beautiful, walked away from by those who once owned them, boarded up, windows broken, stuffed to their ceilings by everything left behind-old furniture,  cash registers, display cases, hat racks, bubblegum machines–almost all the old rag dolls of capitalism a person could possibly imagine.

Shoshoni is where Lea Ann and I will soon come to watch the great solar eclipse of 2017. Just outside of town is supposed to be one of the best places in the world to see the moon cover up the sun for a few minutes.

Downtown, Shoshoni, Wyoming, population 649, August 10, 2017. 

The Good Life

I used to think that the good life was the life that most faithfully recreated childhood, but I was wrong. The good life is becoming old enough to know how to fill up an inflatable pool with air and water, then pulling up a chair on the lawn to watch the children swim around in it for hours.

Inflatable pool, $19.95, backyard, Spencer Roddan's home, Salt Lake City, Utah, August 8, 2017. 

Robert Frost Roddan Garfunkle

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not be Stuart Davis, a painter from the 1930's, or a Brazilian poet who wrote poems on scraps of leftover paper only to throw them away. Hello darkness my old friend, I've come to photograph you again.

The author at 2 a.m. in his favorite chair, San Francisco, Ca. July 28, 2017. 

On a theme by Ellsworth Kelly

Heather had never liked her name. When she said to people, "hello, I'm Heather," she didn't feel good about the way they looked at her. This difficulty had persisted since childhood; one therapist suggested Heather's dislike of her name gave her the ability to abstract, to literally "step outside herself," making it sound as if self-loathing was a gift. It's true, Heather could be two places at once, sitting for instance at a dinner table with others while imagining she was laying on her bed in mid-afternoon, her favorite time of day, the window open a crack, the curtains three-quarters drawn, not so much to keep the light out but to encourage the breeze to move the curtain softly, like someone was behind the curtain breathing.

Spectrograph, Ellsworth Kelley canvas, pre-gesso, concept and photograph by author, July 26, 2017. 

Poem for Bill Knott

What if you sat at your typewriter

as if you were looking into a mirror

while you were writing? 

Would you see your words

looking back at you, 

or the faces of the words

themselves?

Screenshot of the late Bill Knott's blog, 2014, the year of his death. 

Real art, hollow celebration, and Stuart Davis

The best museum show I've seen in years is now at the deYoung: "Revelations: Art from the American South." 

The worst museum show I've seen in years is now at the deYoung as well: "Summer of Love."

And then there are the paintings of Stuart Davis, a show also at the deYoung. Davis is a painter for all of America, a painter who makes paintings in which there is either nowhere or everywhere for the eye to go.

Artist statement, Mary Lee Bendolph, quilter, from the show, "Revelations: Art From The American South"; deYoung Museum, July 9, 2017.

Drinking coffee with my mother

Sometime this morning I passed through the "everything is bullshit" phase of my life.

It took me by surprise I must say, happening so quickly and without ceremony, completely extinguishing a worldview that had served me so faithfully for so many years.

I sat for an hour or so in my big black chair, drinking coffee, wondering just how to proceed, what to make of the world now that everything in it had meaning.

Photo of a protest march outside the G-20 meeting, Hamburg, Germany, as seen in The New York Times, July 8, 2017.

Autobiography of a pseudonym

I see that Albee stipulated in his will that any uncompleted manuscripts existing at the time of his death should be destroyed.

What manuscripts is Albee referring to? And where are they? If I find them first can I put my name on them?

Living room blinds, side view, San Francisco home, July 5, 2017. 

Monica Vitti

Post-war Europe was tailor-made for the existential, a time when it was so much easier to see what's wrong with ones life than what's right, and to have real reasons for doing so.

Existential Spokespeople abounded, but no one said anything with as much intelligence as Monica Vitti in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni.

"I don't dare look too long at the ocean for fear I'll lose interest in the earth." 

And. 

"There's something terrible about reality and I don't know what it is, and no one will tell me." 

Monica Vitti, from Antonioni's, "L'Eclisse", 1963, screen capture by author sometime in early 2017.

Mao Trump

We know what populists look like, we've seen them before, they're always on the right. What would a leftist populist look like? Like Mussolini?

If Donald Trump really wanted to "drain the swamp" as he says he does, he'd Tweet that he intends to make new policy re: The Supreme Court–no more lifetime appointments!

City sign, 25th and Geary, San Francisco, Ca.  June 29, 2017.

Grizzlies come off the endangered list

Please explain to me how it happened that when I stopped on the downtown street corner yesterday (1st and Mission, San Francisco) dwarfed by all the big new buildings there, I felt larger as a human being than I'd felt in some time.

Right there and then I made a vow to do more in my afterlife than I'd done here on earth.

Hotel pamphlet, as seen in the B.B. King Museum, Indianola, Mississippi, June 8, 2017. 

Local honey

Politics: the constant revival of human ideas that haven't worked in the past. 

And there are always two sides to every story, unless pure evil is involved; in that case only one side is required. 

Might there be something Heisenbergian about climate change? 

When I think of my heart as a beekeeper, everything is all right; I can breathe more easily, even while the earth is buzzing around my ears and my eyes.

I now see I've grown in grace to the degree where I now understand that paper shuffling may well be very good for society, and that bureaucracy is not necessarily a bad thing.

And that I will drown someday in the testosterone of my tears.

Mid-century modern chair in author's study, San Francisco, Ca., 6/18/17. 

A book, unplugged

I'm going to sit at my desk for awhile until things look interesting.

Then what...read a book?

A book needs light.

Yes, a book needs both light and darkness, unlike a tv.

A tv is quite often more visually arresting when the tv itself is turned off rather than on.

Sign, grocery store, Clarksdale, Mississippi, June 10, 2017. 

The blues inside me

The day I return home from Mississippi I ask the magic eight ball, "should I keep my mother's transistor radio?" 

The delta's still whispering in my ear, a parade route full of superstition, small towns and good times, a place that builds its own museum everyday.

"Mama," I say, "the thing's antique and needs batteries, but when I put it to my ear I can still hear you singing."

Abandoned drive-in hamburger stand, Winona, Mississippi, June 12, 2017.

Mississippi Delta

There are some things that never happened, even though many people say they happened and built tremendous stories around them happening whether they really happened or not. 

Did Robert Johnson really sell his soul to the devil at the crossroads of Hwy. 61 and Hwy. 49?  

Most probably not. 

Probably the story that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil was made up by people who thought the blues was devil music and that Robert should have been singing spirituals in church instead of singing the blues.

And if Bessie Smith had been a white woman rather than a black woman would she have survived that terrible car crash on Hwy. 61-very near the place where Robert Johnson had, a few years earlier, sold his soul to the devil-that took her life?

Maybe.

An eyewitness, one of two white men who who were at the scene (the one who bandaged Bessie Smith as best he could, the other one walking to a nearby house to call for an ambulance) said, "there's no way a ambulance would take a colored person to a white hospital." Bessie Smith died the next morning in the colored hospital in Clarksdale, Mississippi. 

Then again, some things really did happen as some people say they happened, and there's proof they happened, there's 'evidence' in the form of written records and other public testimony.

Concert Poster, Delta Blues Museum, Clarksdale, Mississippi, June 9, 2017. 

Meditation at 66

If my life has a pattern, and I can't be sure that it does, there is a blue line at the bottom of it and a yellow line at the top.

One line represents who I am, and the other represents what's wrong with me. If I look hard enough at the lines I can see that one is my baby face and one is my death mask.

And what are the words for, the words that can be seen on the other side of the paper the blue and yellow lines are drawn on? To tell me what's good about my life, and exactly where I'll drown in Aegean waters.

Lines drawn with a yellow and a blue Sharpie by the author on a piece of previously used paper, May 31, 2017.

Poetry snob

Amazing how fantasy adjusts to reality, and vice-versa. How the pinecones that have fallen from fir trees in central Oregon look like failed actors, fired by the theatre boss for not knowing their lines. The people, if there is such a thing, are sitting in big new pick-up trucks named for national parks, scratching off lottery tickets they've just bought at Circle K. It's amazing how gradually the men and women of this country have become reverse pioneers; that is to say, they no longer wish to tame the wilderness, they only want to stay somewhere very near themselves and what they already know, fire up the barbecue and dine on red meat and wine, then watch tv. And there's nothing wrong with that, there really isn't, so long as they've made provisions for the little bird outside the window at four in the morning, digging its own grave with a song.

Manuscript, novel by Thomas Fuller tentatively titled, "The Autobiography of Poetry."

Sunriver

Where can you go to get back what you've forgotten?

The Deschutes River, Bend, Oregon, sunset, May 26, 2017.

Early Koons, seminal Monique Prieto

The Roddan Foundation announced today that its internationally recognized collection, thought to be the largest holding of suburban conceptual art in the world, has relocated to San Francisco.

In addition, the foundation announced a new acquisition: the Jeff Koons sculpture "Furious Vacumn" (foreground) purchased recently from the original owner in Portland, Oregon, price undisclosed; and the restoration and re-hanging of LA artist Monique Prieto's painting, circa the late 1990's (background).

Hallway, house, 614 28th Ave, San Francisco, toward the end of remodel, May 21, 2017.

Abstract postmodernism

If you knew you were seeing something for the very last time would you look at it differently?

By the way, is there still such a thing as experimental art? Maybe there never was. Besides, what could be more experimental than riding a horse through the High Plains 150 years ago and being so hungry you'd take a chance on eating something you see growing on a tree without knowing what it really is.

Ordering a salad at McDonald's 5 minutes before closing time and requesting that it be, "fresh," is bold, but to actually make the salad is revolutionary.

The salad's good, the price is right, the people who work in this McDonald's are kind to one another and hardworking. All my previous assumptions about fast-food and the nature of corporate enterprise are exhausted, as well as my tired old cynicism that thinks 'how dare they call this a restaurant.'

Seeing that it's almost quitting time, I eat my postmodern salad with gusto, then get up and leave.

Empty booth, McDonald's, Lander, Wyoming, 10pm, May 11, 2017.