The Times Quotidian

There has been much said about the satire and punster atmosphere of the work of Adrian Saxe. But when asked point blank “What interests you about your work?” Saxe responds without pause, “the space, how you operate it… you know, how you drive the car.” Like most, I have have focused on the shear visceral and astounding technical prowess of Saxe’s ceramics. His mastery of historical appropriation played against tongue in cheek post-modernism is what catches our attention, but for Saxe it is covert feasibility that keeps him up at night.

Saxe’s vessels are operational. His ewers pour, maybe only for the most rarified of ritual, but that is up to the collector’s discretion. “…operation of the vessels in their intended use, even if only once (and subsequently in the imagination or mental appropriation of potential use) is what interests me. The viewer’s speculation about touching and moving the operational parts, with or without actually using the piece for its implied or understood use, becomes important. I often have a weird or discomforting device as a handle or spout on a ewer or covered jar. The physical encounter and interactivity is only one of many aspects of pottery, but it can be paramount for fully experiencing the work and understanding the intentionality behind it.”

His simple statement that ceramics both occupies and contains space took me by surprise. It dawned on me, while the rest of us have been satisfied with being seduced by the lush glazing, detailed surfacing and titillating lusters, Saxe has been “driving” the container. That the exterior and interior operate on a quid pro basis is at the core of Saxe’s preoccupation. Perhaps the consummate expression of this are his Klein Bottles. Saxe delights at the equation used for execution and the precise point of perpetual return. He giggles with glee at the ant, who no matter how long he journeys, always stays on the same surface of the object. These vessels turn in on themselves so that what was once hidden is now revealed. This is no pun, but a true rendering of concept.

Please click to enlarge for Titles and Date information.

Rita Valencia

I am married to filmmaker Kirby Dick. The Washington Post identified me as a Mexican actress because that is the information available on IMdB, and it has never been corrected. I am not her, I’m a writer and a Sr. Art Director/Creative Director at an advertising firm in L.A.

As a person who never felt “American” even though I was born here, I see, and admire a certain ethical and moral advancement, uniquely American, based on a deeply held belief in rationalism. Because I share neither this belief in rationalism nor the ethical advancement it engenders, I have always been amused by my husband’s selection of subject matter for his documentaries, and have always noticed that he was drawn to ethical/moral/sexual scenarios which raised many questions and inflamed both inter-personal and public controversy. There was the fearless invasion of privacy (and partnering with my ex-husband) in PRIVATE PRACTICES (1986), the equally cheeky elbowing in on a relationship between a dominatrix and her sub in SICK (1997), and the dragging into the light of the evils of a religion to which he was an utter outsider in TWIST OF FAITH (2004). Kirby’s work is always a kind of invasion, which would be arrogant if it were not grounded in the rational-ethical. I always cringe when my husband asks if I’m ready to hear what he’s thinking about going after next…which is a good thing.

At the beginning of this project, OUTRAGE, the first people to question its premise were sitting around the dinner table: my son and Kirby’s mother. Our son felt the subject matter was the equivalent of ratting people out. No moral relativism here, this was, to his 17-year old sensibilities, wrong. People can admit wrongdoing when they choose. That is an absolute right. You have no right to tell on them EVER. Of course, I raised both my children to nevertattle! Kirby’s mother, another anti-tattler, felt that it was wrong to shine the light on very personal secrets. I was on the fence, but I had a queasy feeling about the whole thing. Closeted public officials represented a morass of bad karma: already they are dishonest on so many levels, already they have blood on their hands for supporting government policies that harm or kill citizens, always with compromised reasons for doing so. The closet was certainly not the worst of it when it came to official disingenuousness. Wading right into this karmic sinkhole was going to bring conflict and damage. This was only the beginning of months of debate and discussion between Kirby, his crew and friends and about the whole issue of outing people who were in the closet and in public life. Who was fair game? Who was off limits? Once again the issue of hypocrisy became the standard. Hypocrisy is, after all, the ultimate crime against the rational-ethical, because it adds inconsistency to simple dishonesty. Was the film to be about outing people? Was the film to be about the closet?

Kirby Dick

The greatest challenge in making the film was in no way, however, the moral argumentation that framed it; it was that Kirby is by training and sensibility a verite filmmaker. Therefore, he needs to stories to follow, people engaged in activities, experiencing drama, living out conflicts. His initial concept, to both follow activists who were engaged in outing as well as to oversee his own investigations into a rather long list of government officials, was a gamble, based on a delicate structure of hypotheticals. By the law of averages, at least one prominent-enough person should show up at a bar with a same sex partner, or one of the guys in an escort service would talk on camera, or a former aide would agree to go on record.

One by one the hypotheticals crumbled. None of the “outers” ever outed anyone. The all-night stakeouts outside a certain Senator’s home netted one mysterious male guest who spent the night…but it was impossible to prove that they had had sex. Another investigation was supposed to turn up decades-old documents to prove a sex crime, but the search done by an professional expert in historical investigation, also a deeply interested party in the case of the particular official under investigation, concluded that the documents were “missing”. A subject who claimed to have an incriminating photograph strung the crew along for several months until it became apparent that he was lying. A rumor, which seemed to be substantiated by eight people turned out to have one source, who was unreliable. The most ambitious, nerviest and cleverest of Kirby’s interns had exhaustively searched the gay bar scene, dated D.C. escorts, discovered the secret showers in the basement of the Capital building–but nobody would go on record to talk about any of it. One hoped-for breakthrough after another went down ingloriously, until all that was left of the plan for this film was utter disappointment and a shattered budget.

It became grimly clear that there was no verite to be had, and possibly no veracity, from which to make a film. A deadly “essay” film was all that was left, something that would die after one bleak week at a festival somewhere, excluded by the blogosphere because there were no juicy new outings, ignored by the gay press and abandoned by funders and distributors. Into the wreckage walked Doug Blush, who had edited ‘Wordplay’ and ‘I.O.U.S.A.’.  Doug’s style was, as Kirby put it, more painterly and more intuitive than his previous, much beloved and respected editor, Matt Clarke. The energy began to build again, and the editing team regrouped and reworked. Crafting a story from interview footage and title cards, a new film began to emerge, and the subject matter slowly crystallized from being a failing attempt at sensationalism to a careful and balanced analysis of the closet and its psychological, political and social effects–a very different film than would have been made if all the hypotheticals had fallen into place. This was both ironic and fortuitous.

There had been a hope that OUTRAGE would open before the 2008 election. It was now December 2009. The election deadline had passed, but Obama had won, and the body politic was no longer so desperately angry. A new and impossible deadline for a cut was set for mid-January, to submit to Tribeca. Charlie Crist (Governor of Florida) was the slightly disappointing “star” as the outed politician-on-the-rise. To some bloggers this was not particularly news, but to the great majority of people interested in this film, it was. The evidence of his hypocrisy was plentiful but again, lovers of powerful men do not tend to want to rat them out. Crist, a deeply boring man, deserves as much if not more opprobrium for using possibly the emptiest, stupidest rhetoric since Ronald Reagan, as he does for being a closeted homosexual. [Of course in the day of brouhaha over his announcement that he would run for Senate, not one of the mainstream news outlets said anything about the flourishing stories of his secret life with male sex partners, or his opportunistic marriage.] Other great moments emerged in the film: Jim McGreevey’s tears, and his beautiful ex-wife’s heart-wrenching testimony; Dan Gurley’s transformation; Michelangelo Signorile’s story of how the media deliberately ignores this issue time and again. Check out the story about NPR censoring a review by Nathan Lee (http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/archives/2009/05/npr_censors_its.php) and listen to Terry Gross get EXTREMELY uptight in her interview. Kirby realized that she had not watched the film after being baffled by her off-putting manner. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103832005) Indeed, in her interview in The Advocate, she admits to only being “briefed”. The blind eye of mainstream media might just blink, if enough people persist in supporting what this film is trying to do, which is to say that the Closet is a deeply destructive place to live and work, for those who take up residence there, and for the rest of us who accept the fear and loathing that supports it.

Terry Gross’ Advocate interview: http://www.advocate.com/print_article_ektid84096.asp

I have to lead this piece with Mary Astor. Her ability to be both benign and malevolent at the same time within the same character is rare. I believe her motives no matter which way they lead. I first fell for her as an innocent in Red Dust (leave that dufus husband and run off with Clark Gable already!), but her flawless portrayal of treachery in The Maltese Falcon was no less compelling. In Midnight wealth becomes her. She inhabits her aristocracy with a great sense of ease and cunning. The cornucopia of adornment that would be considered on most “laden” feels natural, polished, on Astor.

Simone, played by Elaine Barry is the great facilitator of Midnight. Without Simone there would be no hats to buy, advice follow, nor party guests. Her brooch is the  most dauntless and bold of all brooches (see slide 6). This simple centipede seems to infect her like an assassin out of a 007 film. She is formidable and as such delivers one of the finest lines in Midnight:

“It always rains when Stephanie gives one of her dull parties; even Nature weeps.”

Please follow the highlights, commentary on a slide by slide basis when you launch the slideshow.

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One of the pleasures in reading Christopher Isherwood is the ease with which he writes in the first person. He creates an atmosphere of intimacy where one is privy to all kinds of internal and external dialogs. The reader becomes complicit in a constant barometric recording of success and failure. Unfolding narratives explicate on topics ranging from sexual aspiration, neurotic deliberations, spiritual sleuthing or (most satisfying) his own grappling with the writing process.

Here is an excerpt from My Guru and His Disciple where he shares an aha! moment, a discovery that allows him to move forward with the translation of the Bhagavad Gita text. What starts out as a pedantic laborious effort at transcription turns into poetry.

And then—it was really amazing—I saw in a flash what to do. I ran back to my room with the manuscript.

Our version began: “Oh, changeless Krishna, drive my chariot between the two armies which are eager for battle, that I may see those whom I shall have to fight in this coming war. I wish to see the men who have assembled here, taking the side of the enemy in order to please the evil-minded son of Dhritarashtra.”

In about half an hour, I had turned this into:

Krishna the changeless,
Halt my chariot
There where the warriors,
Bold for battle,
Face their foeman.

Between the armies
There let me see them,
The men I must fight with,

Gathered together
Now at the bidding
Of him their leader,
Blind Dhritarashtra’s
Evil offspring:
Such are my foes
In the war that is coming.

I brought this back and showed it to them, and they were both excited. I’m excited myself, because it opens up all sorts of possibilities, and I now realize how horribly bored I was with the old translation. I don’t see my way clearly yet, but obviously this method can be applied throughout the book. There should be several different kinds of verse, and I think I can vary the prose style too. We are going to Aldous this evening, to discuss the whole thing with him. — Christopher Isherwood, October 1943

The Big Gundown (album) is John Zorn’s tribute to Italian master film composer Ennio Morricone. The featured track, Giù la testa (Duck You Sucker!), is from the 1971 Sergio Leone spaghetti western Fistful of Dynamite. This remix is imposing. The color and diversity of the instrumentation alone makes for worthwhile listening. The opening Shakuhachi riff is an inspired imaging of the gangster theme. Our once grisly gunfighter collides head first into Burt Bacharach and emerges a shoop, shoop, Samurai Warrior. Zorn’s witty re-paired soundtrack now is more resonant of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, the “eminent ur-text behind all Leone’s movies”. 

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The Ensemble:
Ned Rothenberg…shakuhachi, orcarina, Jew’s harp
Michihiro Sato…Tsugaru shamisen
Wayne Horvitz…organ, celeste, electronic keyboards
Vicki Bodner…English horn
Fred Firth…acoustic guitar
Bob James…tapes
Arto Lindsay…vocals
John Zorn…game calls, vocals

By Guy Zimmerman

In various spiritual traditions it’s common to hear the feminine identified with some version of open-ness or space, while the masculine is identified with form or substance. In Buddhist iconography, for example, wisdom is viewed as a quality of open space and as a feminine attribute. The womb, with its potential for birth, is evoked as an image. But in certain esoteric tantric disciplines Shiva, the masculine principle, is identified with root awareness – the ground out of which experience arises – and his consort Shakti is identified as…well…everything else. The feminine here is the profusion of all that can be experienced. A recent encounter with two sculptures by Richard Serra underscored for me what this shift is about.

In search of inner peace a few weeks ago I paid a visit to the Broad collection at LACMA and spent time with the two massive Serra sculptures that occupy the two wings of the ground floor. Sequence, in the Western gallery, involves two hundred and thirteen metric tons of steel rolled into twelve foot high sheets that wind along side each other in graceful nested curves you can walk through. Doing so, for me, was a potent experience. The Paleolithic steel walls rose up in narrow canyons that seemed to resonate dissonantly with hidden energy centers in my body. Overwhelmed, I staggered out the other side and had to find a bench. But as powerful as Sequence is Band, in the Eastern wing, is the truly remarkable work of art.

Standing in the Eastern gallery with Band you have the feeling that there is no valid reason to be anywhere else. Composed of the same twelve foot high steel walls as Sequence, Band somehow ennobles the space it occupies (this, of course, is what sculpture is supposed to do.) The curving walls flow up and back with the grace of a dance move, but without surrendering any of their convincing weight. You become aware, as you walk in and out of Band’s circular, heart-like chambers, of time slowing and then accelerating again. If you’re like me you imagine, if only for a moment, that you are not walking at all and that it is the steel walls that are in movement, flowing past and around you. Other polarities that typically animate Serra’s art – hard and soft, simplicity and extravagance, mystery and blunt physicality – here seem to achieve a new harmony of purpose that lightens the heart. It’s as if Serra’s work is showing us how to contain our own opposites.

Emergence, emergent form are juicy but also slippery concepts used in various scientific disciplines to describe how a simple process suddenly up shifts to a radically higher level of order. Various random air currents in the Gulf of Mexico suddenly begin to reinforce each other and the “emergent form” of a hurricane slamming into New Orleans is the result. Emergence is certainly a useful idea when thinking about the evolution of an artist’s style over the course of a lifetime. As they struggle against the resistance of the material in which they work, significant artists often reach a stage where an entirely new kind of harmony becomes possible. Their work from that moment forth becomes about ringing the changes on that new set of possibilities – Jackson Pollack and the first drip paintings…Rothko and his color fields…the sudden appearance in Phillip Guston’s work of cartoonish, hooded KKK figures. I’m tempted to believe this kind of emergence is what you encounter when you wander from the highly dynamic and overwhelming Sequence to the equally dynamic and overwhelming, but also utterly sublime, Band. Out of the same elements Serra has been working and re-working for years a radical new expression opens up.

But this begs the question: what specifically is at work in Band? My gut tells me that the root polarity in Band must be discussed in terms of male and female archetypes. Serra, certainly, has always registered strongly in this arena. A hyper-masculine figure seeking dominance with hard hat and cauldrons of molten ore, Serra early on adopted a minimalist stance that excluded anything hinting at softness. And yet here, in Band, what Serra seems to have been aiming at all along was the creation of an undulating container for everything that surrounds it, as if the masculine, at the final degree of its austerity revealed itself to be an altar for feminine abundance. The walls curve and flow the way they do because constant change is the nature of what they seek to contain and support. At rest in this masculine container we inhabit the profusion of the feminine. Band is a devotional act toward the feminine. It will be interesting to see if Serra continues to mine what feels to me like a very rich vein of artistic gold.

Midnight (Paramont Pictures, 1939) is a remarkable movie on many fronts. First, its cast which includes Claudet Colbert, Don Ameche, John Barrymore, Mary Astor, Hedda Hopper, Monty Woolley and more whose names are not as familiar, but whose faces abide (for instance the delicious Rex O’Malley!). Next, there is the pedigree screenwriting team of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, the director Michell Leisen, also responsible for the comic Easy Living and the stunning costume designs of Irene.

My first impulse was to post about the fashion of the film and still I still intend to do so. But, as I started to study further my initial seduction gave way to my long standing love of typography. So many fonts choices were made in this film it is a bit boggling; five different styles alone for the opening credits. The treatment of the film title is gorgeous with its open face cursive script for Midnight. It continues with the open face type treatment for the cast credits, but here a far more proper application. Perhaps my favorite is the “E” used for Leisen, the way is connects first the the capital “L”, but then leads the way unattached at the end. Paris, itself comes alive with its signage and all in this delightful comedy light up.

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I want to thank Charlene Matthews for this recommendation. We swap films and other cultural aesthetics. She is a great Hollywood resource and book binder extraordinaire.

From The New Yorker, May 4, 2009 — Illustrations by Anders Wenngren

This is an animation and takes a minute to run. So please be patient and enjoy the fabulous yoga demonstration! 

I never had the opportunity to work directly with Mr. Iyengar, but did spend many years studying with his student Dona Holleman, pictured here executing Vrschikasana. There is a kind of body knowledge that can only be transfered by being in the presence of the Guru, an absorption of experience fueled by unbroken attention. In the early days, when Mr. Iyengar had only a few sheep in the flock, circumstance allowed for daily hands on learning at the source. Much like Sri T. Krishnamacharya instructed the young BKS Iyengar, so did Mr. Iyengar teach Dona Holleman.

It is truly extraordinary to have this photograph to show the continuity in the teaching. This photo was taken in the mid 1960’s. Dona remains as supple and focused as pictured. She unlocked the key for many a pose and instilled in me a home practice that I still faithfully adhere to. — Nancy Cantwell

Photograph Courtesy of Molly Rhodes

Initiation creates a special link between the guru and the devotee—a spiritual connection that represents a unique responsibility on the teacher’s part and a significant challenge for the practitioner. Through initiation, the aspirant becomes an integral part of his or her teacher’s lineage (parampara) which is understood as a chain of empowerment that exceeds the world of space and time insofar as it continues after the death of both the teacher and the disciple. Admission to this chain must be earned through wholehearted dedication to the spiritual path, which is a form of self-surrender. — George Feuerstein, The Yoga Tradition