I call it ORANGES

During the pandemic, my friend Liat Yossifor and I collaborated on a collection of poetry and paintings. Over the course of a year, Liat would send me images of works on paper that she produced during lockdown and I would respond with a poem. The result is Letters Apart, co-published by Dopplehouse Press and University of La Verne.

The pandemic has often yielded unexpected fruit. One of the therapeutic joys, one of the events that saved my mind though the course of this terrible run of months, has been an exchange with Liat Yossifor, a friend and painter who lives in Los Angeles. Periodically, Liat would send me a painting on paper, and I would respond with a poem. The project will eventually be a book, but from the series, two poems have been published. I thought I would post a link to these poems here.

Fires burn in California. Indiscriminately, they start as though at random, pockmarking the map with red circles. We start receiving news with percentages of containment, potential evacuation orders, and, horribly, news of deaths and destruction of bodies both human and structural. We see images of firefighters, of planes skimming the tops of lakes to drop the contents of pelican hulls onto flames, snuffing spots tiny in relation to the vast land of smoke.

Pico Iyer, writing of Cuba in 1994, focused on a single detail that seemed to capture the desperation of what he saw. I’ll never forget it. He said that the young girls, for lack of money for lipstick, would rub crayons on their lips to beautify themselves for the men they hoped would pay them to have sex. Iyer didn’t privilege this detail in any way. He just employs it so it could do its job. Extreme poverty, perverse resourcefulness, and voided childhoods all funnel into one crushing instance.

I watched Tacita Dean’s Presentation Sisters, 2005 for the first time in 2018. Installed with a flanking hallway at MOCA, I turned the corner into the viewing room, to that blanket of warm sound that an old projector makes. There was a couch to sit on, and the film was (surprising in an artworld phobic of religion) about a convent.

The film's locations -- a series of rooms, gardens, and grounds -- would have been evident as a convent had not one nun ever appeared. I have known many convents.

The Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido in Venice is shut down and awaiting renovation. The grand dame, built in 1900, is now surrounded by fence. Walking around its cordoned off grounds means navigating a stretch of busy blacktop and pulsing cars. The hotel closed in 2010, and a conversion into luxury condos is in progress.

To visit this hotel was one of my geekier ambitions, as it was a ruin that I could not explore but only peer at through occasional holes in its barriers.

Phil Connors: What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?

Ralph: That about sums it up for me.

From Groundhog Day

The opening credits to Groundhog Day is a procession of clouds and circus music. The music is a slapstick series of trombones farting and purring against a triumphant march.

My wife and I were on the street of Split, Croatia, or, to put it another way, we were inside of Diocletian's palace at Spalatum. The emperor settled there after he "retired" from ruling the Roman Empire, handing over power to a tetrarchy in 305 A.C.E. The famous moment in Split occurs in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. when Diocletian was begged to return to power.

I was sitting on a green bench in a lovely park in the Retiro neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Facing me was what the Argentines call the Torre de Monumental, a bell tower given to them by the English in 1910 to commemorate the May Revolution of 1810 (before the Falkland War with Britain, it was called the Torres de Ingles). At my back, across the busy Avenida Santa Fe, at the head of Maípu road, stood the grey walk up where writer Jorges Luis Borges made his last residence.

Ed Ruscha has a great origin story. Even young in Oklahoma, he seemed on the cusp of taking to the open road towards the West. You may have seen that picture of him as boy. He's got that optimistic going places look in a 1950s crew-cut. Apparently, it was a 1950 Ford and Route 66 all the way to L.A., a long ribbon of highway and mountains and road-side attractions stretching out 60 years into the future.

I drove a white Nissan Altima and it was mostly I-40 through New Mexico and Arizona.