v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Tatica 95

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 -Celebrations for Tatica's 95th 

Leo Maxey's Sweet Nine

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 - at An die Musik and Leo Maxey and his group with Billy Wolfe

The Time We Spent in Ocean Park

Vallejo Nocturno 2018- Ocean Park 2010 self portrait

 

So what I remember is that we were staying at a small hotel on the beach in Ocean Park for just one night. A vacation within a vacation. It was just 9 months within the new job that I had so things had not yet broken up as they eventually did so life was still coherent except this was the last time that we were going to be with Rafael who would pass away in three months. A surprise to some and an obvious conclusion to others. I did not see it and now when I see the fotos from those days its more obvious but then within life it wasn't. Anyway the time we spent at this place which we liked to visit was spent with lots of rain and we spent our first day there playing with our cameras which is always a lot of fun because there was a lot of cloud cover and perfect lighting for portraits and so we took these fotos which today look good but when I see them i think of how blind we were on one hand and yet we took the fotos to mark the time and notice these details afterwards.

Busy-bodies

"The greatest showers-off and busy-bodies are men. And so this world is ruled by men, because it is a world not of doing but over-doing. A world of simple doing would need no ruling. It takes really very little doing to keep comfortably and happily alive. We ought not to pay much more attention to doing than to breathing.

All this extra doing interferes, in fact, with comfort and fun and makes a bad kind of laziness instead of a good kind. Good laziness is thinking — knowing about yourself and knowing also about everything when you want to… You would not be surprised if you realised that it didn’t take brains to do things. Birds, bees, ants, dogs, tress, earth, the sky — all these and everything do the most marvelous things, but they haven’t brains like ours. Never be impressed by what people do, dear Catherine. Doing is only natural."

 

Laura Riding, Four Unposted Letters to Catherine

Jack Whitten - Art Inventor

From Hyperallergic, an article on the career of Jack Whitten, an incredibly inventive artis who I just discovered about today when I attended his show at the BMA-how does one miss this type of talent in the 50 years that I've been following art?:

Jack Whitten, who died this weekend at age 78, cut across a lot of lines in his art and in his life. He was born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1939, when Jim Crow laws were used to enforce segregation. He heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak in a church in Alabama in 1957, and talked to him briefly, while a freshman at Tuskegee University. He participated in the Civil Rights movement, encountering white-sanctioned anger and rabid incivility. It took courage and determination to do these things. It took more than courage not to become bitter about what happened then or later.

In 1960, Whitten got on a bus and came to New York and studied at Cooper Union, where he was the only black student in his class. During this time, he met Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Barnett Newman, as well as Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Norman Lewis. He recognized the importance of being who he was at that moment in time, as he told Kathryn Kanjo in an interview for the catalogue of the 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting:

Can you imagine what this meant for me? I’m getting information from both sides of the divide and, believe me, we’re talking a divide. Those divides did not meet. By being a student — my coming in at that opportune time — I had access to both sides of the divide. In retrospect, this was the best thing that could have happened to me, a young black kid from Alabama — from the background that I came out of — to have access to these kinds of people. I am talking mentor figures.

In 1965, shortly after he graduated from Cooper Union, Whitten’s work was included in a four-person show at Allan Stone. He had solo shows there in 1968 and ’70. While critics have pointed out the influence of Abstract Expressionism on these early works, something he readily acknowledged, I was struck by the other sources he was drawing upon: the high key cacophonies of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner; the “simultaneous moment” in Pavel Tchelitchew’s painting “Hide-and-Seek” (1942); the late figurative work of Jackson Pollock, just to name a few. He was working in a way that ignored the distinction between abstraction and figuration, another divide.

The idea of purity held no interest for Whitten, and the reasons seem obvious. When you say that paint must be paint, you are aligning yourself with one side of the divide, a goal that Whitten never pursued. Could paint be paint as well as capable of doing something more? Black, after all, wasn’t just another color in a can.

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Ida Gramcko

Cambia / Ida Gramcko

 

Change

Change
within your memory.
Remember yourself, a presence, and be quick,
volatile, vivid, impersonal, a person,
forgetting the death that takes root
like imagination and delays you.
Because the imaginary life is elsewhere,
it’s a howling life amidst the norm,
a ferocious life, practical magic
from the beyond... The clouds overflow
with lists of crayons and a sloop
lives like the curve in the waves.


*


Cambia

Cambia
dentro de tu memoria.
Recuérdate, presencia, y hazte rauda,
volátil, viva, impersonal, persona,
olvidando la muerte que se arraiga
como imaginación y te demora.
Porque es otra la vida imaginaria,
es una vida aullante entre la norma,
una vida feroz, práctica magia
del más allá... Las nubes se desbordan
con listas de creyón y una balandra
vive como la curva entre las ondas.




(1952)
  from the blog Venepoetics

Las emociones suaves

La tarde entra a mi cuarto

como una buena hermana

y desde un silencio pensativo

su sonrisa de enferma abandonada.

 

La noche se ha escondido en los pantanos

del parque. Las arañas

tejen cansadamente y hay pupilas

indefinibles junto a la ventana.

 

Juan Guzmán Cruchaga

Miriam Hassan

 

Mount Felix Winery

Vallejo Nocturno 2017 - soccer mouth

Several weeks ago on a very nice Saturday we headed off to taste some wines here in Maryland. The atmosphere was right-sun streaming down in October, large dogs looking to play. It was the right thing to do despite the fact these wines were really below average. But the reality is that the atmosphere was right and then some details really don't matter. Mount Felix.

Ashbery Time

 

 

Matthew Bevis writes in Harpers about the new biography of poet John Ashbery by Karin Roffman:

In 2006, when New York’s city council declared April 7 John Ashbery Day, the poet couldn’t resist asking: “But what does a John Ashbery Day mean? Are people going to stop and pause and think for a minute?”

Maybe we could use that sixty-second silence to cast our minds back to the time before he made a name for himself. Ashbery was nearly fifty when Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, his seventh collection, finally brought him widespread acclaim in 1975, and although he already had the makings of an audience, he didn’t quite have a public. Some aspects of his youth, particularly the early 1950s in New York, have received attention — David Lehman’s sprightly study The Last Avant-Garde comes to mind — but Karin Roffman’s new book is the first comprehensive biography of his childhood. The Songs We Know Best draws on a great deal of unpublished material: a thousand-page diary Ashbery kept between the ages of thirteen and sixteen; drafts of almost all his adolescent writing; interviews with several close friends; and more than a hundred hours of conversation with the poet himself. “I’m sometimes kind of jealous of my work,” Ashbery once observed. “It keeps getting all the attention and I’m not. After all, I wrote it.” Roffman redresses the balance while also keeping a close eye on the work; her aim, in fact, is to reveal “an intertwining of life and art in extraordinarily intimate ways.”

The biography is certainly revealing, but it’s noteworthy that the poem from which Roffman takes her title raises some doubts about intimacy: “Or do ya still think that I’m somebody else?” Ashbery has said that “artists are no fun once they have been discovered.” Roffman’s portrait of the artist as a young man made me think of what the young man said to his friend and fellow poet Kenneth Koch when they were undergraduates at Harvard in the 1940s: “I try to erect a smokescreen near the end of my poems so I can withdraw unperceived — I never like to be around for the last line.”

The songs, poems, and lives we know best frequently tell us how little we know. Although Ashbery is fascinated by biography — Roffman says that his enthusiasm for the mode is “at the service of his desire to become a better reader of the writers he liked” — many of his favorite writers drew attention to the limited ability of life writing to explain either the self or the work. As Gertrude Stein, one of Ashbery’s first literary loves, wrote in Everybody’s Autobiography: “Identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.” Ashbery’s work — often funny-amusing as well as funny-peculiar — has flourished in such knots of conviction and incredulity. In the early poem “The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” he is inclined to call the “comic version of myself” — that is, the childhood self he’s recalling — the “true one,” and part of the truth of this springs from the comedy of imagining that you have a self to call your own. (“My life story,” he writes elsewhere: “I am toying with the idea.”)

The question so often asked of Ashbery’s poetry — “What does it mean?????????????” — is one that the poetry asks of his life, although neither the question nor any possible answer to it is ever allowed to steal the show. He is not so much concerned with what one’s life story adds up to as with what it may subtract from.

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