November's poem

You'd of bet a barn and a buttery treasure chest on just one thing:

I was this season's singular beauty

A hoop-skirted eyeblink

Clutching a kerchief

All wisp and veil

Tossing peanut shells and primrose

As pages of wheatsmoke

Rose spiral like doves

Wing-to-wing

In your near-to-perfect ignorance

Tragically sublime

I was your astronaut of the apocalypse

Your savior on a trapeze

Sky of tears above

Bucket of flood-tide below

A kiss is such a lovely trick

Go to sleep, my angel

Dream of babies and bouquets

The Sting Lily, your lost innocence

A single Belladonna for your resurrection

Like autumn’s impassive fire

Or this month’s eager heat

Or a pair of quiet arms outstretched

Begging a solstice moon

Zoology for big people

There’s no way to start this post but to talk about what I’ve already seen in this world animal-wise. Because last night, I saw a creature that boggled my brain and I’ve encountered a few brain-boggling beasts in my very short life: swimming with schools of tiger sharks off the east coast of Malaysia, petting a fifty-pound long-snouted tapir at an animal reserve in Ecuador, riding a ten-foot high elephant named Sunshine on the island of Koh Chang. But none of this prepared me for my encounter with the Weedy Sea Dragon.

G and I bought tickets to the Academy of Sciences' weekly Night Life event, when the venue is exquisitely devoid of children and, as the publicity department raves, you can sip creative cocktails against a backdrop of live DJ music and let exotic animals transport you to equally exotic destinations around the world.

We arrive about 15 minutes before the doors open and the line is already around the block. Swarms of twenty-something’s huddle together against the cold – the knee-high boot and hipster hat are much in evidence. Forty-five years old suddenly feels conspicuously middle-aged.

The line begins to move and once inside the cavernous museum, we stand in the foyer for several minutes, taking it all in: a life-size giraffe in one corner, a neon-lit mini-bar at the opposite end, the bones of a whale hanging above, and Claude, the ten-foot albino alligator, perched atop a rocky crag in the middle of a huge indoor pond.

We wind our way up and around the spiral rainforest and move onto Africa; I’m unfortunately underwhelmed by the lackluster dioramas and stoically taxidermied safari tigers and wildebeests. They look realistic enough but they’re all in bucolically supine positions, as if nudged peacefully awake by some khaki-clad nanny in a pith helmet.

I have vivid childhood memories of going to the Natural History Museum in L.A., haunted for weeks afterwards by the enraged grizzly bear standing upright, front paws raised to the sky, lips bared, all tooth and claw. Or the mountain lion lying on its stomach, head up, eyes boring a hole straight through you, a lifeless rabbit hanging from its blood-streaked mouth.

Now those were dioramas that kept you up at night and captured the unrestrained brutality of the animal world. The Academy’s stuffed animals were ample in verisimilitude but lacking in ferocity.

But the highlight of the trip for me is the penguins; I’ve been talking about them all day and they’re slated to make a special appearance at 7pm that night. Well, someone obviously forgot to let the penguins know about their theatrical showcase, because at 7 o’clock they are all lying prostrate on their bellies, lazily fanning their thighs (do penguins have thighs?) with flippered wings. No wading, no waddling, no high jinks; I’m about to ask for my money back but G leads me downstairs to the aquarium.

The aquarium is now a tropical disco with music thumping against the glass enclosures and first dates pressing against each other while eyeing the phosphorescent fish. This floor is mesmerizing: interactive tide pools where we run our fingertips along spiny anemones and poke leathery starfish, day-glo jellyfish that float like slow-motion ghosts, a giant female octopus with python-sized tentacles. Her suction cups press against the glass as she moves herself across the windowpane, raising her diamond-shaped head colored crimson, two impossibly tiny eyes surveying the crowd.

We move among the exhibits, from the Royal Python to the Fire Bellied Toad to a school of thick-bodied groupers swimming overhead along the glass ceiling. And in the center of it all, we come to a standstill. Stopped dead in our tracks. Frozen smack dab in front of the home of the Weedy Sea Dragon.

I stopped writing just now to Google images for these psychedelic sea horses but, of course, it doesn’t do them justice. To see them “in the flesh” is mesmerizing, their plankton appendages, tubular snouts and electric-rainbow flesh. They float gracefully above the sea grass like miniature prehistoric ballerinas, hypnotizing us with their freaky beauty.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m prone to personification when it comes to the animal world, but these sea-creatures seem primordially wise, gliding zen-like beneath the water’s surface, their beady eyes mystically opaque.

People call their friends over to see, a huge crowd has gathered, the question on everyone’s lips: “What the hell are they?”

Found only around the southern coastline of Australia, they are slow-moving relatives of the seahorse and rely on their leafy protrusions to provide camouflage. The docent arrives and answers questions, one after the other. He ends with a mini-lecture: the story of the Dance of the Dragons, their mysterious mating ritual where the male sea dragon mirrors the movements of the female, a dreamy underwater waltz.

“The dance,” he says, leaning into the crowd and pausing for dramatic effect, “can sometimes last for hours.”

Festival of lights

There's always a period of curious fear

between the first sweet-smelling breeze

and the time when the rain

comes cracking down.

Don Delillo

I'm thinking a lot about my friends in Thailand right now, especially the Bangkok crew. This week is the Loy Kratong festival, one of the most beautiful celebrations in a country of many breathtaking traditions. Every year when the moon is full and the rainy season comes to a close, Thailand’s rivers and canals fill with millions of kratongs, floating lotus-shaped lanterns. The tradition, centuries old, is meant to placate the country’s goddess of water.

My first Loy Kratong celebration was eleven years ago; we were invited to a friends’ house and when we arrived, her entire family was there, the living floor strewn with banana leaves and bright yellow marigolds. We spent the entire afternoon building our banana leaf floats, decorating them with flowers, incense sticks, and candles. As soon as the sun went down, we gathered along the banks of the Wang River that ran through our town and let go of our kratongs, making a wish and watching them drift out to join a parade of candlelight making its way down the river.

I know this year will be especially poignant for so many Thais with floods still threatening the provinces. Earlier this year, with the Red Shirt riots raging, I wrote this poem and somehow it seems fitting months later, with the sadness that still blankets the country. But from what I’ve heard from friends still living there, this year’s Festival of Lights was just as spectacular as ever.

curious fear

this isn’t your milk & honey wilderness

this is tongues-on-grass

and tracer fire

these magnesium ghosts

breathing crimson

across the riverbank

a kingdom, a cabaret,

a translucent sheet of cloth

this is memory

and monkey-shine,

a camera-eye invention

your helicopter patio

too close now

to petrol paraffin

and a matchbox sky

this is your seven-colored

shadow dance

stained plasmic by spirits

too unruly for these

tender-hearted houses

sweep up a garland of chicken bones

and a single cigarette

still burning days after

these savage rains

who are these slash-and-burn warriors

trespassing your buffalo folklore

as june’s clouds

pummel the pockmarked streets?

land of tears, you whisper

and the firecracker-madness

floods the sky once again

The Man With the Movie Camera

Went to Pacific Film Archive last night to see The Man With the Movie Camera, a film from the series Kino-Eye: The Revolutionary Cinema of Dziga Vertov. We’d seen this film once before, a decade before in my studio apartment in San Francisco. We watched it from bed, pillows propped against the wall, the images playing across a 24-inch cathode ray tube television. We played an exterior soundtrack by Biosphere which further psychedelicized the whole cinematic experience. It made an impression back then despite (or maybe amplified by?) the small television screen and homespun environment.

In the PFA auditorium, this print was much larger than life and accompanied by a live piano score. Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov (born Denis Abelevich Kaufman ~ 1896–1954) is an essential name for any film student, of whom there were many in the audience last night. And this particular film, I think, is a must-see for anyone interested in the evolution of cinema.

The 1929 silent documentary, edited by Vertov’s wife Elizaveta Svilova, records life in Odessa and various other Russian cities. Certainly the subject matter, getting such an expansive glimpse of 1920’s Russia, is enough to hook a viewer. But it’s the stylistic elements of the film that create the experimental excitement, with slow-motion, split screens, inconceivable angles, and the most powerful technique -- frames flickering by in a breathless, almost contemporary MTV-ish manner. In the span of just a few moments, we see a row of newborn babies in a hospital room, a beggar on a dirty sidewalk, a crowded lunchtime coffee shop. And of course, we see the camera, literally and figuratively, aware of its presence in every frame. With no story and no actors, the camera becomes a protagonist.

As Vertov himself wrote:

"The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCENARIO
(a film without a scenario)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature."

One of my favorite scenes is of a convertible speeding down the open road, the driver and passengers all young and fresh-faced, laughing into the camera – and Vartov balancing himself on the side of the car as it bumps along, impossibly juggling tripod and camera while filming the jubilant faces against the backdrop of the countryside. He is filming and being filmed; in this scene and throughout the entire film, we witness subject and object simultaneously.

Though not all the images are uplifting or triumphant, there is a joy that threads the entire film. Vertov’s work has often been compared to Whitman, and this connection struck me immediately. The rapture of the ordinary, the pulse of life, the simple and profound joy inherent in the act of observation.

I went back to some Whitman this morning; here’s a passage that would be a perfect companion to Vertov’s man with a camera:

Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

Mini-snickers & pixy-stix

Halloween is an undeniably ridiculous holiday, at least the way we celebrate it in the U.S. I am reminded of that fact when G and I walk down the main thoroughfare (the day before the 31^st) on our way to a Sunday night out.

Minutes into our stroll, a ragged mob of rowdy teenagers roll by on bicycles, each wearing a 99- cent store mask. Disguised, they scream past like banshees on their way to rob a bank. Up ahead a cop car waits in an alley ready to pounce on the troublemakers.

In the gas station parking lot at the corner, two men decked out in Western gear kneel next to a brand new Harley. They’re carefully arranging a trio of vodka bottles in a harness hanging from the saddle of the bike. It’s not clear whether the leather fringe and pointy alligator boots are costumes or everyday dress. The passenger raises an open beer bottle to us as they roar past.

This is the kind of behavior that makes me want to lock my doors and pull down the window shades by sundown on the last day of every October. Give someone a mask and suddenly there’s a hidden identity, a possible alibi, a license for vandalism and mischief. Once the face is hidden, dormant desires however dark come to life, egged on by the gruesome atmosphere branded by Hollywood’s Halloween.

At T-Rex, over a plate of $1 oysters and a few glasses of red, we plan how to barricade the patio so as to avoid the packs of sugar-crazed children and nervous clusters of young parents that we know will be knee-deep on our street by 5 o’clock. We’ll make a sign, “Sorry, out of of candy,” hang it on a piece of string and tape it up across the entrance to the porch. That way we won’t be seen as neighborhood party-poopers; we were up for the fun for a little while, they’ll think.

But on the way home, a beautiful Indian-summer evening, we find a perfect 20-pound pumpkin perched atop a garbage bin, uncarved, blemish -free, just waiting for us. A treat put on our path by some pagan spirit campaigning for observance.

Gary hoists it on his shoulder and we carry it home.

We spend the evening carving and scooping and roasting, something I haven’t done in probably about twenty years. Hands full of pumpkin goop, smell of seeds cooking, candles lit, The Stones through the speakers, a perfectly blissful way to celebrate the night before All Hallows Eve. It all feels far removed from mini-Snickers and Pixy-Stix.

So now that we have this exquisitely carved pumpkin just waiting to adorn our front porch, it seems criminal not to entertain a few handfuls of trick-or-treaters, at least for an hour or two. The next morning we trudge to the nearest Walgreen’s and buy several bags of diabetes-inducing sweets (the ubiquitous mini-Snickers and Pixy-Stix included) and as soon as the afternoon light begins to fade, we seat ourselves down on the patio chairs waiting for the first band of young ones to stop by with their plastic buckets and shopping bags.

5pm, 5:30, 6pm… the cuticle-moon is now bright above and still not one child. Plenty of commuters talking into their cel phones, walking from the BART station to San Pablo, and bikers flying by on their way home from work. But no pint-sized witches or devils or pirates.

What were we thinking? What mother or father in their right mind would venture towards the end of our block for their Halloween fun? We’re four doors down from the intersection of Church’s Chicken and Bingo’s Liquor. And more than half of the doorsteps on our block are dark and uninviting. Everyone below the age of thirteen has been loaded into vehicles and driven to other neighborhoods where the houses are decked out with cotton cobwebs and eerie music blares from loudspeakers pointed out the open windows. That is certainly not our neighborhood.

Suddenly, a voice from across the street yelling, “Are you giving out candy?” In the dusk light we see a young mother pushing a stroller and a tiny figure standing beside her wearing a dark cape and a necklace of neon green.

“Yes!” we scream, simultaneously. “Come on over and get some candy. We have tons!”

They cross the street and the mother waits on the sidewalk while her son walks up the path to our patio steps. I kneel down in front of him, the over-brimming bowl of candy outstretched. He politely takes a few purple jawbreakers and puts them in his nearly empty plastic bag.

“Go ahead, take a few more handfuls,” I whisper. “And make sure to get some mini-Snickers.”