un regard oblique

14.5.03

San Francisco History Index
at the somewhat eccentric zpub.com

...No trace of you, though, or your pink
nurslings; our fierce thirsts drove you
back out into fields whose hungers
you'd already fled, where if you became
some fox or coyote's scrap of protein...

W. D. Snodgrass
Leavings
Poetry Daily May 14 2003

badger and dude in badger costume clash; badger wins battle, loses war.

Bob Zippy May 14

Scott Saw

Outside There's a War

12.5.03

an illustrated companion to John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing'

by george dillon
University of Washington, way back in '98

{something I wish I'd had when I read it the first time}

"Like many people, I have no religion, and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with the tide. I live in the doubts of my duty.... I think there is dignity in this, just to go on working.... Today we stand naked, defenseless, and more alone than at any time in history. We are waiting for something, perhaps another miracle, perhaps the Martians. Who knows?"
Federico Fellini (1920-1993), Italian movie director, quoted by Martin E. Marty in Varieties of Unbelief

Quotation cited in Round Earth Society(Brazil)

11.5.03

Mother Jones

{take the three other figures in this photograph and change their clothing and hairstyles to contemporary models, you'd hardly notice the difference. they translate, you can see them in Time, in Newsweek. not her. where's her modern counterpart? where are our elder women?}

Alastair McNaughton

Mother and Child, Himba, Namibia

Edward Steichen Mother and Child-sunlight

Frederic Leighton Mother and Child

Frank Dicksee The Mother

Arab mother and child at LAPL
Jewish mother and child at LAPL

Elin Danielson-Gambogi, Mother

Helene Schjerfbeck, Mother and Child

John William Waterhouse Danae

Alexandra Frosterus-Saltin Mother with Her Sleeping Child

Chilean Mother and Child

Samoan Mother and Child

Japanese Mother and Child

Inuit Mother and Children

Akseli Gallen-Kallela

Lemminkainen's Mother

Marcus Leatherdale
Adivasi Tribals
at marcusleatherdale.com

whirling on ice you couldn't
stop on, I wondered how much you knew
in those seconds when no maneuvering
could save you, and whether the wide-eyed look
you'd turned towards me was on your face then:

Joan Aleshire
Wide-Eyed Look
Poetry Daily May 11 2003

10.5.03

Elsa Lanchester (not 'caster') at Turnabout Theater
remembered at LA Public Library
also this image
and this

also:
Odetta was 'discovered' at Turnabout Theater

Palestinian embroidered dress
image in the Photo archives of LA Public Library

An A-bomb blast set off in Nevada at 4:36 a.m., on April 18, 1953, was judged by early risers to have been the most sensational of any seen so far. The blast made the eastern horizon as “bright as day.”

Los Angeles Herald Express Tabloid Photos exhibit at LA Public Library,
original exhibit curated by Diane Keaton
link path from No Sense of Place
also this image of LA policewomen
and this Manzanar Farewell

JG Ballard: Author

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

Joyce's incomprehensible novel, which has provided a living for generations of English Literature professors, represents a lamentable tendency in 20th-century fiction: the quest for total obscurity. Finnegans Wake is the best example of modernism disappearing up its own fundament.

Brits wits dis lit
Independent UK 08 May 2003

...Orlando used to be called Mellonville, used to be infested
with pests. Shuffleboard, croquet, lawn bowling. Plumosa,
cabbage palms, banana and bamboo. Hibiscus here
is a spicy weed, not a pricey exotic, we rip the stuff
out of the back yard and burn it.

My hair is wet underneath
from March through November. I save a
drowning boy, being from Orlando. My
brother swims in the Junior Olympics. My mother
swims across a lake when she is angry
at my father. She wears her clothes.
She swims for three hours.

Year after year we ski around
Orlando, in between Orlando, all the lakes,
blue pads of cool, some bottomless, some so
brown from pine needles unfolding, they stain
the whites of your eyes til Christmas. We thread
our way through the wet blue heart. We think surely...

Heather Sellers
Being from Orlando
Poetry Daily May 10, 2003

9.5.03

Eric Meola

he's the Afghan greeneyed girl guy Saris

at Tamarin/Photo
Meola's mentor Pete Turner
link path from plep

I was a girl, and these celibate Sisters had spent their young and middle lives caring for girls like me. Brought to communal Shaker villages themselves when their own families had fallen asunder, the Shakers I knew had chosen to spend their lives in the faith when they grew up in spite of the cost—no marriage, no sexual expression, no children of their own. As they grew to womanhood, their motherly hearts found reward in the care of girls.

So when I came and showed enthusiasm for Shaker history and affection for the Sisters, I entered a place in the heart already prepared, although I didn't realize it at the time. I was just glad that they liked me.