acid gr[qu]een (you have a funny way of showing it)

acid queen–tina turner (aside: saw tina when she was making her comeback tour “private dancer” in chicago at the park west theater on armitage in 198_. had a table in the front row with a group of friends, got showered with sweat from her and her sax player who was also smokin’ hot. best ever concert.)

acid green is one of those colors that i find particularly inspiring. it just kicks you in the ass and screams, “get the hell out there and do something!”

ran into a bridge railing riding my bike one sunny afternoon in moorhead, minnesota, after a kegger in a park down by the red river during my sophomore year at good ole msu. there may have been other contributing factors to my accident. didn’t hurt myself, but the front wheel of my bike was bent to shit. (lots of swearing in this post, but acid — green, queen, or otherwise — does that to a person.)

if i ruled the world

with a tip of the hat to maira kalman and rick meyerowitz.

the modern century (art* & plant)

vlaminck, dufy, derain, braque, van gogh, cezanne, lautrec, gauguin, caillebotte, matisse, picasso, leger,

greizes, duchamp, gris, lohse (manet, courbet, david, ingres), turner, delacroix, millet, chirico, savinio (apollinaire, breton and romantics, fauves, post-impressionists, cubism, dada, surrealism, expressionism, futurism, abstract-expressionism, pattern & decoration, conceptual, realists, symbolism, revolution, salon des refusés, african tribal masks, and ukiyo-e)

de stijl, bauhaus, the armory show, moreau, redon, ensor, seurat, rousseau, goya, degas, pissarro, sisley, bonnard, vuillard, vallotton, maillol, rodin, mucha, klimt, beardsley, schiele, kokoschka, munch, nolde, kandinsky, marc, delaunay (robert & sonia), chagall, malevich, goncharova, brancusi, arp, picabia, ernst, schwitters, modigiliani, soutine, beckman, dix, grosz, davis, dove, hartley, o’keefe, moholy-nagy, rodchenko, masson, miro, klee, albers, calder, giacometti, lachaise, moore, and gonzalez.

and on and on and on, etc. and so forth; you get the idea. in the meantime, the century plant marks time one leaf at a time.

*western, caucasian, male (for the most part), and dead.

the title was going to be, “the myth of memory, a history”, but i changed my mind & now it’s “how fate works”

so: first i saw the photograph and it got me to thinking (see paragraph in green), but that didn’t seem to really convey my thoughts on the image as succinctly as i thought it should.

“they” say that to write your memoirs you should build a linear narrative; recording dates, experiences, births, deaths, marriages, moments of your life that for one reason or the other have stuck with you.

the author works on the yearbook his senior of high school. yes, i know who she is, but for privacy’s sake will not identify her.

and in the same vein this came unbidden (also in green):

i think it was mark twain who said that an autobiography is made up of the small details and not the large ones (i paraphrase.)

but i felt it was headed no where, and it was beginning to sound sort of hoity toity, when i know i don’t have the wherewithal or at the least, i did not want it to go that way, when i thought of dosso dossi’s wonderful “allegory of fortune“, which then prompted this:

and that my friends, is how fate works.

a week of first paragraphs–saturday

“On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Maroltt, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular. An empty egg-basket was slung upon his arm, the nap of his hat was ruffled, a patch being quite worn away at its brim where his thumb came in taking it off. Presently, he was met by an elderly parson astride on a grey mare, who, as he rode, hummed a wandering tune.” –Thomas Hardy, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”

a week of first paragraphs–friday

“‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won’t cry? How to win the darling’s love, mister without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again…’ Just before dawn one winter’s morning, New Year’s Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.” –Salman Rushdie, “The Satanic Verses”

a week of first paragraphs–thursday

“Ennis Del Mar wakes before five, wind rocking the trailer, hissing in around the aluminum door and window frames. The shirts hanging on a nail shudder slightly in the draft. He gets up, scratching the grey wedge of belly and pubic hair, shuffles to the gas burner, pours leftover coffee in a chipped enamel pan; the flame swathes in blue. He turns on the tap and urinates in the sink, pulls on his shirt and jeans, his worn boots, stamping the heels against the floor to get them full on. The wind booms down the curved length of the trailer and under its roaring passage he can hear the scratching of fine gravel and sand. It could be bad on the highway with the horse trailer. He has to be packed and away from the place that morning. Again the ranch is on the market and they’ve shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, “Give em to the real estate shark, I’m out a here,” dropping the keys in Ennis’s hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.”  –Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain” (from her collection of short stories, “Close Range, Wyoming Stories”)

a week of first paragraphs–wednesday

“We’re going for a midnight boat ride. It’s a cold, clear summer night and four of us–the two boys, my dad and I–are descending the stairs that zigzag down the hill from the house to the dock. Old Boy, my dad’s dog, knows where we’re headed; he rushes down the slope beside us, looks back, snorts and tears up a bit of grass as he twirls in a circle. “What is it, Old Boy, what is it?” my father says, smiling faintly, delighted to be providing excitement for the dog, whom he always called his best friend.”  –Edmund White, “A Boy’s Own Story”

a week of first paragraphs–tuesday

“I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool’s-parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.” –Evelyn Waugh, “Brideshead Revisited” (Book One, after the Prologue)

a brief history of john baldessari

see also: baldessari, baldessari, and baldessari (not necessarily in that order.)