Episteme

Out of my fitfulness emerges something a little closer to calm, nothing overly dramatic or pining death omens or whatever such nonsense. I spent part of the long weekend in Desolation Wilderness, the kind of place where you need a permit to go backpacking, the kind of place where you lay on a granite slab lake side and see the Milky Way. While I was doing that, I thought of a recent New Yorker article, which you can read in PDF form, about how light pollution has ruined the night sky almost every where and the darkest place in the United States is in Utah. It's about a lot more than that, but laying on the granite slab Sunday night looking at all the constellations, stars, and Milky Way, it was a perfect scene except for all the planes that flew overhead all night long. Staying at Lake of the Woods means you are under a busy flight path.

Why I was concerned about bears when I could hear the faint rumblings of Highway 50 in the distance? I needed to be in the woods and the setting and the experience were perfect in every other way, but how hard is it to avoid the sounds of engines these days? Where can I go and not feel like I am in a backyard?

My boyfriend and I talked about the theological implications of extraterrestrial life (it was more like I talked at him about this and he politely listened) and all the silly things one talks about in the blackness of night under a sheet of stars. What ruined the calm, mild summer night was those damn planes and their flashing lights, low flying presence over the peaks going somewhere not nearly as important as where I was trying to go.

But the air was still fresh and fragrant and the water cold and sweet. Those disturbances could be forgiven because I had little choice and time to go elsewhere.

Continue reading "Out of Doors and Self" »

Posted by Dawn at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't get the same feeling in the center of my stomach that used to when I traveled as a teenager. At sixteen, the world seemed so hopelessly small, consisting of overbearing parents, awful high school classes, and a suburban town so sprawling and boring, I am terrified to go back still. OK, my life isn't exactly like a Richard Yates novel, not yet anyway, but my point is this tremulous, excited feeling I now lack when I get ready to board a plane to some place I've been before.

I think that's mostly because I fancy myself a very smart person indeed, who sees all the similarities of how everyone every where lives - see how smart I am? Or maybe it's the dreaded airport security or just being discontent about a lot. I don't really know. But what it does mean when I hit the road is that I must try harder to see beyond my own perceived notions of the world and let the new environment tell me what I should know.

In going to Mexico City, the new environment told me a lot and my notes are pitifully inadequate because I was lazy and on vacation. But going to Mexico is a trip that is especially important for Americans because we are in the midst of a hyperbolic immigration debate and unfortunately, like the Chinese, Americans love to hate on Mexicans, who provide them with cheap services, food and day care, among so many other things.

My one week trip hardly makes me an expert but it showed me why people who want to change their lives or their children's futures would want to leave for the United States. It also showed me why so many Mexicans who do come to the US to work also want to return to their home country - it's an amazing place. A part of me wishes my time there wasn't spent thinking about something like immigration, but for me it was inescapable, especially coming from California, where so many Mexicans end up.

Continue reading "What Mexico Taught Me" »

Posted by Dawn at 08:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here I am on the eve of travel after a month absence. It's so easy to get consumed by absolutely nothing. But I have the feeling, part of it anyway, that I used to get when I was going some place I've never been before - imagining how it will smell and taste, the groans and sighs of the trucks, the sneezes of passersby. There is something comforting in the fact that where I go it seems a little familiar but I also think I've been to places that are alike. My favorite place to go is into the woods where I can't hear car engines or voices and the sound of water filters up through the valley. I find it hard to talk to people when I get back, though I've been finding that difficult for a while. Anyway, off to Mexico where I hope to see so much that I am completely overwhelmed by it all. Certainly, my knowledge of history is inadequate for all I will encounter. I promise to take good notes and pictures.

Posted by Dawn at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's just after the holidays and I'm at an altitude of 7,300 in a city I'd never been to a year ago and that I now call my home. Looking out the window, which has new curtains on it (ordered by me and put up by a member of the other sex, drill in hand, curtain rods in tow), I see a city of buildings, not high like New York or charming like San Francisco, but just lots of concrete buildings that look like they went up in the 70s or 80s.
Actually that's not a trivial distinction, since if they were built in the 70s they survived the earthquke of 1985 in an area that was hit pretty hard, so the older buildings are the really tough, squat, thick walled structures, often with crud-covered art deco tiling that begs to be restored but lays silent, ignored, year after year.
Beyond that there are police sirens, cars honking in the distance. The clock ticking on the wall. My eyelids getting heavier, my head supported by my hand, my elbow propped on the strong pine desk where I like to write.
It's just after holidays and I'm reeling from a diet of presents, a visiting brother who wanted to see a real Mexican wrestling match, from a cream-filled cake of the three kings and from the fried chorizo sausage I just ate when what I really wanted was a light dinner. I'm reeling from a different conception (no pun intended) of the same holiday, from my boyfriend's family hugging me as the clock struck twelve on New Year's, from a little girl I'm starting to love. And outside all I see is the squat buildings, two higher ones on the sides, framing a soupy, reddish black Mexican midnight sky.

Continue reading "This Night I am in the Perfect Place" »

Posted by Kim at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have a small notebook some where which lists the titles of various works of art. I came up with the ingenious idea while taking pictures of works of art for myself and for this blog. Of course, like all things with meaning, it has somehow become lost, somewhere. I actually still think it's in my suitcase, though I don't know. In any case I can remember where I took this, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art just outside Copenhagen.

Yes, I remember it well. It was an arrestingly beautiful day and the museum sits by the sea so at times it the views better outside than in. This is painting by Gerhard Richter. It has order to it that my life does not and it has a sense of simplicity and structure that my life does not. I don't say those things with any sense of longing, it's not things that are so unstructured I can barely hold down a job or anything, but you know I see the lines and the space and color and there's harmony. But whose life has all those things anyway?

OK, so that's not what I'm trying to get at. This work, the name I don't know right now, is a magnificent grid whose patters manipulate space and rhythm of the universe. It's truly wonderful, the colors and the apparent randomness of those colors but they aren't, there's logic and order.

Posted by Dawn at 07:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Of all the works to photograph at the Tate Modern, this was the one I chose. I remember that night, not long after playing music with my ass, and walking all over the place and being generally tired from two weeks of running like mad from country to country all in search of friends and familiarity. Yes, that night in mid-September was truly tired but possessed by what I saw: a yellow t-shirt.

Continue reading "Yellow T-Shirt" »

Posted by Dawn at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was a white Lego paradise in Oslo. Nearby the National Gallery, thousands, may I hazard millions, of Legos where left out in a public square for people to assemble. It was part of another public exhibit encouraging people to construct buildings, real and imaginary, from Legos in a makeshift city of skyscrapers, futuristic domed dwellings and rather fantastic towers. What I appreciated most was how none were vandalized or destroyed, though some in were in various stages of disrepair or disassembly.

After a few drinks with a group of friends, we came upon the eerie white constructions late one evening. Maybe is was the drinks I imbibed but I was taken with the wonderful site and amazed that people constructed replicas of the TransAmerica Pyramid and Eiffel Tower on these folding tables laid out along this square.

Continue reading "Art in Public, 2" »

Posted by Dawn at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh the art! I've been thinking about the art, the art from Europe, the pictures I took surreptitiously while away, in all the many weeks I've been lamely absent (but always thinking about posting). Those gallery guards would turn their backs and I'd snap a photo - BAM! - inside that small contraption, an image, frozen of something meaningful to me. The art I love, always so simple, always so very much what it's meant to be, which I don't always know but I know it's good because I can feel it. Some of the very best art I saw while in Europe was in the public sphere, meant to be engaged by anyone. There's something so grand yet straightforward about public art projects, especially the good ones, which are rare, alas.

In this exhibit I participated in, you make music with your ass. Quite literally. This was one of my favorite examples of the public art projects I saw, this time in London on Sept. 16.

Continue reading "Art in Public " »

Posted by Dawn at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have plenty of good reasons why I went the entire month of September without posting a single thing. I'm sure Kim has some good reasons why as well. But I'm not going to dwell on all the negatives (moving, lots and lots stuff to do at work) but the positive ones: going to Europe for the first two weeks of September. I have lots of material to comb through but I felt it most appropriate to start here - a blurry photo of my half eaten Belgian waffle enjoyed at some touristy cafe in Brussels. That's what my vacation was about: indulgence, but of a cheap variety, and enjoying all the things I miss from when I lived there. Yes, the half eaten Belgian waffle is a symbol of my two weeks spent running like mad from country to country, seeing friend after friend, and remembering just how much I enjoyed being a student and being foreign. It's the decadence of Europe but also the familiarity of things remembered and all the photos I took surreptitiously in museums. Oh, the art! The art!

Posted by Dawn at 08:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)