tara's tierra

The Game of Life

I always preferred the game "Life" to "Monopoly." With Life, you got to pick a car, and as you went along the board, you might add a husband, a wife, or a kid or two, depending on what you spun on the white plastic wheel (of course, the cars were blue and pink, and gender was firmly fixed, unless there is an early 1980s Berkeley version I did not know about). In the board game version of Life, there seemed to be more successes than failures and I don't ever remember facing anything grave like death, or disappointment, or disease. Maybe it's the optimistic side of the ten-year old me that is recounting this story. What a little fool she was.

In New York, I see all of life's emotions compacted into one day, a thousand times over. I see people hugging like they are saying good-bye forever. I see teenagers making out on benches like they want to swallow each other whole. I see men so angry they scare me as they menacingly bound down the street with their hoods up and their heads hung low. I see little babies eyes open wide looking at pumkins at the farmers market. And then every once in a while, I see someone really crying. Sobbing. Balling their eyes out. And I don't know what to do.

This happened once in DC years ago. I saw a girl I knew from a coffee shop, a girl who had waited on me time and time again, just crying her eyes out on the street. And I wanted to go hug her for a half an hour and tell her she should take Sunday off, I would wait her tables. Instead, I shot a compassionate look her way and kept on walking. Tonight, it was just awful. I was waiting for a friend I have not seen in a long time in front of the Forever 21 store in Union Square. This girl around my age walked by on a cell phone. She was in black exercise pants, nice sneakers, a black fleece, and she had her hair in a messy bun, much like my sister Julia sometimes wears hers. The girl was visibly crying. Really, really crying. And she walked a little past me, then turned around, walked back and leaned against the wall not five feet from where I was standing. She had tears just streaming down her face. Her nose was crunched up. She was pacing. I kept glancing to see if she were off the phone because I really would have asked if I could do something. Of course, in ten seconds time as I made a phone call of my own, I glanced back up and poof,--like everyone in this city-- she had vanished into the cabs and buses and tunnels and lights.

At least 100 people passed by in a matter of ten minutes, all with various expressions on their faces. Some had awesome days. Some had shitty days. Some had the usual average day that makes the game of Life so unbearably slow. I hope the girl crying knew I wanted to ask her if she were okay. I hope she doesn't think that the city didn't notice her, or feel her, or experience that knotting in the throat a million times before. How many tears have fallen on my street alone?

When you're up, you're up. But when you're down, you're down. And the luck, it just never runs out.

a popped balloon

one of the saddest visions is a shriveled up, popped red balloon. when i was young, my favorite book was called the red balloon. the entire book was predominantly in black and white, except for the red balloon that hung on a thick white string on a boy's balcony in paris. the boy went chasing after the red balloon all over london. the last page of the book was a two page spread of a gorgeous blue sky with every color balloon possible filling it. they were all floating there freely (this was before everyone got so freaked out about balloons killing dolphins that choked on them in the sea).

i stepped on a red balloon today.
no, that is not true.
i was the red balloon.
lying on the sidewalk on channing.
tara stepped on me.

 

The New Denim

When is the sad, sterile store known as the Gap going to get a clue? I walked by tonight in the deplorable Marina district of San Francisco and laughed at their new ad campaign, "The New Denim." The what-did you-say-you-original-thinkers-the "new" denim? Denim is as old as the gold rush. Every shade. Every cut. Every pocket and stitch and hem. The ever so curved athletic mannequins in the windows were donned with nothing but white tshirts (the new WHITE! Come to the Gap tomorrow. The Brand New WHITE!) and what looked like khakis. But, a-no,no,no, gentle young consumers, 'tis not just khaki. If you approach the glass more closely, oh, but you, too shall experience the orgasmic khaki-hued cotton that is "The New Denim." The New Denim experience was pre-dinner. The next installment is post.

So, I'm walking out of the restaurant, Greg in tow, and feeling the cold air hit my occasionally nicotine-inspired lungs, I sniffle a little. Suddenly I have a (excuse my candidness) a nice little ball of phlegm in my throat. So, knowing that Greg has long lost any illusion that I am remotely romantic, sexy, feminine or god forbid, "wife"-ly, I decided to just give a good football or baseball player spit right out of my mouth onto the pretty little cement street of the Marina. (Conveniently, I was right in front of this little wine-tasting bistro that is the epitome of everything I hate about the lame Marina. Women who are 40, bleached blonde, and wear a size 8 meet there at around 2 in the afternoon on weekdays, when their 3 little tykes named things that used to be last names like MacKenzie, Reese, and Chauncey, are off at school and down glasses of Pinot Grigio while they talk about important things such as "the suspect housekeeper," "the divorcee from Lombard Street" and the "advantages to conditioning one's hair twice a day versus once). So anyway, I huck my little phlegm smack onto the sidewalk and turn around to see if Greg is laughing at me, but instead there is some tall-dude that is definitely not Greg right behind me and he is cracking the hell up at me. He probably called the cops to report a rogue Berkeley-looking girl in his 'hood. Obviously, one must laugh, toss one's Burberry scarf over one's shoulder, and belch loudly. No Burberry available, I settled for snarling my teeth at the Marina bimbos in the glass. They were, of course, all wearing "The New Denim" and white t-shirts.

Is there anyone authentic left in these parts? Is there anyone authentic anywhere? Please. Come find me, fast. I torture myself by going there, but hell, it's great material.

Judith Linhares

Write my boring papers or dabble in other subjects like art? Of course, the latter! I was reading Bomb magazine today and came across Judith Linhares' works. I really dig her paintings. She is a Californian and the vibrancy yet vulnerability of her paintings excites me. I particularly like one titled "Blaze." She describes the girl in the painting as follows: "My girl is like Snow White because she is on the cusp of puberty. In the orginal fairy tale she is a victim. She is stalked and poisoned by her stepmother, and the only way she can be brought back to life is by a kiss from the prince. My Snow White is seen in the painting in an auto-erotic moment." Later on in the interview, Linhares talks about "possession" as a good term for artistic inspiration. The moments when you are not entirely in control but are channeling something beyond your control. She also talks about painters and caves, saying, "Painters share in a long and complex tradition going back to the caves, which is both a pleasure and a burden. It's a pleasure to see a Roman fresco of rabbits in a field and think, I am one of these craftsmen....the challenge is to use what has been cultivated without being seen only in terms of historic style."  Two of my personal favorite caves are one of Ruben Darío's that appears in his short story El Rubí, and another that appears in the novel Sab and has walls painted with colors from centuries past. Sometimes one needs to live in a cave, for a few days, or weeks, or years, to access the level of concentration needed to produce something of one's own.

Here are a few additional images. I've been muncing on tiny marshmallows all day myself. I bought them for hot cocoa, but they are a sugary pick me up for weary typing fingers. Of course, I'm not eating them roasted around a bonfire with naked women. Too bad. Happy moon gazing and egg-frying. 

color again

Speaking of blurry and non-blurry vision:

"Color is something spiritual, something whose clarity is spiritual, so that when colors are mixed they produce nuances of color, not a blur. The rainbow is a pure childlike image. In it color is wholly contour; for the person who sees with a child's eyes, it marks boundaries, is not a layer of something superimposed on matter, as it is for adults . . . the child's view of color represents the highest artistic development of the sense of sight; it is sight at its purest, because it is isolated." (Walter Benjamin, "A Child's View of Color")

How to seek a world full of color, in a state of "identity, innocence and harmony?" while reflecting like an adult? And why is it negative to be seen as a child when you are well past your building-block days? To me, the best thing I can possibly be is a child forever. To walk around in an incomplete world that I can draw in as I go with crayons. A world that is written in chalk, that erases itself upon a rain and reconstructs itself again. I need to work at gaining access to a spiritual vision again of the things around me and to see the easiness of accessing other planes of thinking if I create enough time and reflection for it. I want to be able to isolate my own sense of sight for awhile, to separate it from hearing, or tasting, or thinking and just write from the blocks again.

Azules

There is a beautiful shade of blue tenting the world today. The sky is clear, the air is clear, the water I just drank was clear. What if I named you that blue? The blue that I wrote about in the paper the other day that is more than its representation on the wall of modern art and more than the way that I imagine the sky would taste if I could eat it.  Bluer than the pool water that is actually not blue but looks it because of the pebbly blue liner and bluer than the way the Stila eyeliner looks if I scribble it all over white tiles.  That would be invigorating: waxy royal blue pencil marks all over shiny clean white tiles.

There is a recurrent idea of bottling desires up into blue skye vodka bottles that I could keep on my shelf. Each bottle would be a Pandora's box. I could open one day by day and unleash the glass blue beads that would scatter all over my floor but would then crystallize into the culmination of that desire -- that unexplainable, unsaid, unnoticed, invisible, -- but entirely present wanting for blue. Unattainable? Maybe. But that's why I want it so much.  Blue, come to me, slowly, or quickly, but come.

Idea Catching

A crunchy laurel tree shakes its jade flakes

onto my worn out shawl

whose branches are covered in a syrup so that the

bits stick to each lock(a lot of strands) like seaglass

on damp sand (a lot of particles).

Later, plucking one off, the bottle green shards

Delight and torment my tongue

Splitting the two chalk tiers

into hope and disappointment.

Swallowing down a maudlin morsel

(performing or being, am I?)

It slides, settling for a day, until

A crispy douglas tree shakes its indigo spindles

Onto my worn out shawl.

Envisioning the Indian

For a few months I have been mildly obsessed with forging some kind of project around Indigenismo (how have indigenous peoples been talked about since the end of the 19th century through today) and collage. But, I didn't really know why this made sense to even explore beyond that I like the aesthetic of assemblage and collage and had found this collage artist from Ecuador whose work I loved (Viteri, his link is on this blog somewhere). Luckily, though, I found this great article last week that really put things into perspective for me and showed me the pitfalls and possibilities of my collage thinking.

Deborah Poole is an anthropologist at Johns Hopkins University but who was trained in Art History. She has written a few books on visual culture in the Andes. The article of hers I stumbled upon is about a Peruvian artist, Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar, who was trained as a painter but then took up photography during the early 1900s in both Lima, Arequipa and Cuzco. Figueroa Aznar was known as a bohemian dandy of sorts who aligned himself with other artists in Peru, particularly in Cuzco. He knew Martin Chambi (probably the most famous photographer from early 20th century Peru), and in addition to portraits, took a lot of photos of indigenous peoples, many of them "staged" in studios as strict physical studies.

One of the techniques that Figueroa Aznar practiced was called foto-oleo, which logically, combined photography and painting (or postivist tendencies with romantic overtones) by treating photography as a technique and thereby less artistic, and the painting piece as the true "art". F.Aznar would paint over portrait photographs he took, adding color to the then only black and white photos. This visual combination is relevant to literature because Aves sin nido, by Clorinda Matto de Turner, begins with an introduction by the author herself about how photography-inspired the book is, striving to capture the "real" nature of society in Peru at the time, a project which the author successfully undertakes. However, the book is also known for its overt sentimentality, something I think maps well with the painting piece of the foto-oleos, given the romantic idea of making photography more artistic and literature more emotionally charged. Matto de Turner's novel came out in 1898 and she probably would have crossed paths with Figueroa Aznar at some point in Cuzco, despite her time spent in Argentina.

Indigenismo's "golden age" is considered to be in Cuzco between the years of 1910 and 1930, when modernist influences from Europe and Argentina were not ignored, but were also not embraced with out critique. Whereas the collage form was celebrated in Europe during this time, Indigenismo discourses and artistic renderings were largely based on the explicit creative ties between indigenous and the earth, and so a more landscape-focused aesthetic presided in the Andes indigenista intellectual circles. All that to say, although I think my collage/Indigenismo project was not exactly on target, I do think looking that the visual components of indigenista literature during the first half of the 20th century could be a fruitful project that would satisfy my visual desires and help unravel Indigenismo as a multi-disciplinary construct since indigeneity does seem to invoke visual images in a way that perhaps other discourses do not so readily trigger.

Next we'll move on to Sabogal's wood cuts...

free form

looking like i am 12 today
with sweatpants and a sweatshirt
covered with butterflies and critters

socks from yesterday and dirty underwear
glasses stretched out over my bridging nose
and hair ponytailed messily with knots

sneakers make my feet look shorter
and flatten me out to a dwarfish stance
and my eyes are itching pinking and gray

chapped lips and zitty chin and
not too much to do or say because
i am dry and stony and not colorful or bright

and nothing really tastes so great
or looks so good, but it has to change
because i can't be so grimy and animalish

and sleepsmelling showerless again tomorrow
pepper up and twirl around or jump
but shake it back into lilacs, soon.

Blue Feet and a Cluttered Mind

I need a color change and blue will do just fine. In my over caffeinated permanent state, I got to Moffitt bright eyed and wet braided tailed today only to spend half an hour looking at art to inspire me to write my paper. I went to NY Moma's site on Kiki Smith, one of my favorite artists, and found out that she incorporated Sor Juana's poetry into some of her prints, so then I got very excited and decided I should write a paper about that sometime, and now, here I am writing about that instead of finishing my damn Cecilia Valdés paper.

I have serious focus issues. Serious, grave, focus issues. I don't like focusing. I like doing what strikes my fancy at any given moment. What a terrible academic I am. I will be relegated to the dustbins of history (!), as if I'll ever even get swept up off the floor!, since I won't ever produce anything good. I'll just hop about from idea to idea, never sticking to one thing. But, I get so inspired for 24 hours and that 24 hours feels so magical!

Smith's prints are so awesome, she uses fairy tales like Alice in Wonderland and Little Red Riding Hood to inspire intricately detailed prints that take years to perfect. Christmas break -- a paper on Smith and Sor Juana! Yeah, right....

Fine. Fine. Fine. I'm going. I am, really. I'm going back into the world of WORD. Black and white, boring, flat WORD. I'm writing in blue today, or maybe even turquoise. Take that, Cecilia. Back to the real work at hand. Why won't the 19th century novel inspire me?! Oh Kiki and her Blue Feet...Check them out!

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2003/kikismith/