A Tale About...

Once, there was a Crow...

and Crow would caw whenever it sensed danger...


CAW, CAW,


One day, it looked down from its perch, and saw a....

Coyote...

 and Crow cawed and cawed.

Coyote's appearance meant that food was coming, and so, other animals were on their way too.

Skunks. CAW CAW


and raccoons and possums. CAW CAW CAW


But mainly, 

Coyote. CAW CAW CAW CAW CAW


Crow looked down from its perch and saw, too, the old witch who fed the Coyote. She lived in a green house, with a green hedge and a green car, and whose complexion was a little green. 

She didn't feed the little children she kept in the oven, but she fed the wild animals that came to her door. She loved the animals more than the little children, and more than her neighbor, who had asked her not to feed the wild animals. 


At one time—about a week ago—the witch had told her neighbor that she wanted to have a good sense of community; the neighbor hadn't realized that what she meant was a community of wild things.


The witch whispered sweet nothings to the Coyote, as Coyote waited for its meal. She told the Coyote to be a good boy, Werden ein guter Junge; then cautiously she approached, while Coyote looked up at the bowl she held in both hands. 

They understood each other; one was wild, and the other, lonely, or crazy, or both.

The neighbor stayed hidden behind the hedges, because she didn't want the Coyote to bark at her; also, she didn't want to be turned into jello by the witch. She knew that witches can do stuff like that— turn bones into halva, or turn coyotes into humans.

End of story?  To be continued...CAW CAW

Weekend in San Fran

The first thing I did when I got home from San Francisco was pull out Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. When my friend Lu first handed me the book, I didn't know how to look at it: I'd never gotten San Fran as a city; it was too small and too big at the same time, too baffling in its hilly and divided neighborhoods. It also brought up memories of passing through in the seventies when the Mission District was a scary run down 'hood and Haight Ashbury had turned into a needle park. Some good memories too, like Green Gulch Zen Center—again, my guide Lu—and Tassajara Bakery on Cole Street, which, if you've never tasted Tibetan Barley Bread you might not get the reference, but sadly, it's too late; the bakery closed its doors in 1999.

This visit was different, though; I saw the city for the magic, infinite city that it is and opened Solnit's book immediately. It's a series of atlases around which she and a bevy of artists/writers/cartographers dissect the city, a city whose demographics and history have changed as much as any great city in the last 40 years. She writes about getting her sources from great books, but also from "living atlases,"  misfit characters who she interviews extensively: "I live among...these books. I also live among ghosts. For better or worse, the familiar vanishes, so that the longer you live here, the more you live with a map that no longer matches the actual terrain. After the great 1972 earthquake, Managua, Nicaragua, lost many of its landmarks; people long after gave directions by saying things like, 'Turn left where the tree used to be.'" 

And that's what this book is like—getting the perspective of ghosts, hobos, migrant workers, thieves, queers, Zen masters, trees, fish....

My own understanding is slight, but on this trip, I came to translate the city (plus Oakland, not the wasteland I expected) in my own way. Bear with me, dear reader, and then read Solnit's book for true illumination.

Rat's Nest basic understanding:

Castro

and

The Castro

The Guggenheim

and 

The Gap at Union Square

telegraph

and

Temescal and Telegraph Ave District, Oakland
(great art, restaurants and thrift stores found here!)

Tenements, NYC

and

Luxury Apartments, San Fran

Mill with sheep

 and

Mills

As part of the Middlebury Language Program at Mills College, 

signs in Arabic, French, Spanish and Japanese appear across campus.

No sheep.

In Shifts

(follow up to post on 6/3)

  

I don't know why I'm afraid to talk to my neighbor Thea about the commotion next door; perhaps because I talked to her last year about feeding the feral cats and skunks and raccoons and nothing came of it. My fear comes, too, from the fact that an old woman can be sharp edged as a knife, dangerous as a steel trap and unyielding to the point of chicanery. 

Don't get me wrong; my neighbor is a wonderful woman, but the busy schedule of the comings and goings of various animals has gotten out of hand. Something has to be done:

7 a.m.: Breakfast, Coyote, table set for one
7:30-8 a.m.: breakfast, seven skunks
noon-3: brunch, six rowdy crows
5 p.m.: supper again for the coyote, although in this part of the country I think you call it dinner.
5:30 p.m.-until dark: skunks in shifts, the occasional possum and raccoon

The point of my argument (to make her stop setting out food) must be in the interest of the wildlife she's feeding. I'll say in a soft spoken manner, "Thea, you're not helping the animals; you're making them dependent on the food you give them. What will happen when you're not here?"

Who will get to the bowl first?

Why would I not be here? she'll ask.

Pause, What then? Am I to say, at your age your headed for the big ballpark in the sky; anything could happen. But I can't say that; it would be too cruel.

Well, what if you get sick, I'll say. What will the animals do?  The coyote might become aggressive and attack some unsuspecting child or small pet; maybe jump over the fence and bite me for interfering with its supper. 

She'll shake her head like last time and say she doesn't agree with my assessment.

I'll say, Okay, you win; let the skunks fill up the afternoon air with stink, let the coyote become a stalker, let the crows caw to their hearts content. I give up, I give up. 

And she'll say, you see, what a lovely talk we've had. I'm glad we understand each other.






But it didn't go like that. When I called her at noon to talk about the problem, she was all good graces; she said she had wondered herself if she was doing the right thing. As a child during the war, she lived on the edge of a forest, and it was only natural to feed the animals during winter. I gently reminded her, an abundant harvest is always available in sunny CA; there's enough little voles and moles to fill up Dodger Stadium. She said so herself: "I have to remember this isn't Germany." So, she agreed to stop. If she couldn't feed one, she wouldn't feed any. She promised, no more food. 

But I feel a little guilty that she won't have the animals to feed. She's lonely up here on Mt. Washington since her husband died five years ago; her daughter lives in Pennsylvania and comes out only a few times a year. It must give her pleasure to take care of so many small creatures. I wonder if I've done more harm than good. 

Neighbor Thea with her daughter Karen, who lives back East.

Will I be like Thea in my old age, leathery and lonely? Will I do anything—no matter how misguided—to feel so needed?


P.S. Woke up this morning and noticed three bowls in her yard, and a possum lurking about. What the...??

Black and White

and a little blue...

Mountain Tapir, Los Angeles Zoo

Eagle Rock Blvd. and El Paso

 Window display, Walker St.

 Flyer on Varick St.

 Abandoned barn, Canajoharie, NY

Barack Obama, Occidental College, 1980

(photo credit: Lisa Jack)

Jacaranda Trees, Occidental College, 2011

HOWL

This is wildly off the subject but I didn't realize that today, June 3, was Allen Ginsberg's 85th birthday. I found out through Peter Hale's terrific blog, The Allen Ginsberg Project, subtitled, An Allen Ginsberg Gallimaufry, a word I had to look up—"a confused jumble or medley of things." But his blog doesn't seem confused; it has a point (and good photos) and that point is sharing facts and wisdom of the Beat Generation and of everything and one who was spawned from the gluttonous, gymnastic, gyzym of Ginsberg's genius. 

So what got me there? I was searching for a picture of Carl Solomon and what his true role in HOWL, to whom the third section is dedicated, was. I noticed that his Wikipedia page was recently updated, so he still means something to someone, or perhaps to many. He was a crazy sonofabitch but as sane as Ginsberg when they found each other in the sanatorium. They remained friends until the end of Solomon's life.

Carl Solomon and Allen Ginsberg at the West End Bar, 1978, 

(photo found on Peter Hale's blog)

Spanning the great divide of being in NYC with being back in LA is sometimes hard to do. For the first few days when I'm back, I feel numb, dumb, lacking in energy. But what peps me up is finding something that, no matter how distant, bridges the gap between both cities. Rereading Ginsberg's HOWL, the section for Carl Solomon, that speaks so holy and wholey of NYC, woke me up again.

My own HOWL woke me up yesterday, early morning. First the crows making a racket on our railing, then caw caw cawing overhead; 

Crows overhead

Then a swish and movement in Thea's backyard:

I snuck outside along the walkway between our houses, and saw my old neighbor Thea putting two plates of food down on the ground next to the canyon, and a second later, a coyote cautiously approaching...

I would say with almost certainty this is the same coyote I saw in the canyon at this time last year, when it was only a toddler. I worried then that Thea might be feeding it, but never imagined she'd be so blatant, deliberately putting out food for it to guzzle down. And guzzle down it did, indicating it's probably dependent on my neighbor—in her delusions of goodwill and ignorance—for the food it eats.

...but I freaked it out!

Freaked out!

It caught me peeking around the corner to take its picture. For the next hour, it filled the canyon with its growls and barks, howls and HOWLS, pursuing me, through the canyon, to the back of my house (how did it know where I lived?) and approaching in its awkward, frightened, vulnerable, sad way. 

Do I call animal control? Do I let Thea continue feeding it? What is the right thing to do?

You can hear it's yips and yaps, along with the crows, here:

Torture by Hip Hop

I was planning to get up early anyway, but at 7 a.m., a loud boombox started pounding out hip hop in waves as if someone was circling the block. The sound was unrelenting: torture by hip hop. I imagined a lowrider from East L.A. driving back and forth, preening his feathers for lower Manhattan. Turns out it was three white guys making a movie in the alley below my window, the same alley, I'm almost certain, that I shot in for the end of my short film (the film that brought me to CA) more than 25 years ago. 

Last day, tying up loose ends. Did I do what I wanted to do here? Going back to that same alley, here's a photo I took, on one of my early walks:

The Excuses, in Cortland Alley

"I ran yesterday," this wall post begins, but then the writer gives excuses why s/he can't run today, but will run tomorrow: it's raining, s/he's sick, traveling, has the wrong shoes, etc. I thought about this a lot while I was here, the excuses for not writing, how there's always an excuse not to write: raining, sick, traveling, wrong shoes. So I tried to stick to my plan of writing everyday, but still, it didn't happen, and at one point I felt discouraged, that I'll never finish a project, i.e., a story, a book, a script. 

There were people to see, lovely friends from long ago that I still consider my closest friends, and places to go: Philli, Providence and Canajoharie. There were my kids. One of the main reasons I come to this loft is to make a little, funky home in the middle of NYC for awhile. Not having my kids around in LA is sort of like torture by hip hop, an annoyance that builds and builds. But for them when I'm around, it's also torture; I can see their annoyance with me, the parental figure still telling them what to do. 

As they get increasingly more independent and stay away from home longer, being in their life like this might not make sense anymore. What is it, exactly, they need from me? Sometimes I have to admit, past a certain age, not much. I remember that same feeling with my parents, annoyed when they called, or antsy sitting at dinner with them wishing they'd leave already. Maybe this is karma coming back to haunt me, but maybe this is how it should be, or rather, just how it is.

I didn't write everyday and I had lots of excuses but I'm trying not to, in the parlance of therapy, beat myself up about it. I took off from the point I had imagined, and although I didn't quite get there, I made a good start. 

Taking off on White Street

Goodbye good friends; goodbye NYC; goodbye, especially, goodbye loft; you won't be the same when I get back, but please take me in again.

Down Under

Completed in 1883. At the time, the longest suspension bridge in the world

When Alice came to the city she had a hankering to go over the bridge into Brooklyn, which got her talking about the time in the 70s, when her artist husband, Chris, had a studio in a backwater neighborhood located between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Later, one of their friends came up with the name DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), to discourage developers from moving into the area.

Lot of good that did! DUMBO is now one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Brooklyn. So yesterday I went to see for myself, setting off across the Brooklyn Bridge with about a thousand other people—mostly French tourists.

Halfway over, I met a young poet sitting on a Benjamin Moore paint can, with "poems" written on a cardboard placard, attached to his sweater; his name was Robert. He looked like he'd just stepped out of Bloomsbury London, circa 1927, or perhaps a Steinbeck novel about the Great Depression, but actually he was a student at Brown, getting a Masters Degree in Literary Arts.

The Poet with his Royal 

Robert had the coolest little Royal typewriter from the 50s, which conjured up images of the Joseph Mitchell/New Yorker era, when writers and poets would poke at those extended, stiff keys to tell stories of the sea, or ports of call, or cantankerous stubby characters—or in Mitchell's case—all of the above, as embodied in the South Street Seaport. Fishmongers, river captains, and legions of rats populate his stories, which recorded life around Fulton Street. Good thing Mitchell can't see the old neighborhood now, with its Disney like setting and Bath and Body Works and Gap stores.

For an unspecified donation, Robert said he'd write me a poem. It seemed like a good idea. I stood patiently by, while he attacked one key after another, resting between each stroke. Finally, the poem was finished. Here it is, to be shared by poetry lovers everywhere:

                                                  Die Woge (The Wave)

The borrower would spend

nights with her own arms

hauling

national surveys

to 

lost bodies;

wall crosser;

green fog;

your first 

word 

was

was

The poem is profound I think. Or if not, then, at least, is the poet sitting on the bridge, and I slipped him a nicely sum under his papers. 


Once over the bridge I walked down the cobblestone streets of DUMBO, passing boutiques and storefronts that had homey names, like, "The General Store," which in this case turned out to be a white table clothed eatery. At Front and Washington, I found a great used bookstore, where I bought three books, had a double macchiato at a little French bakery around the corner, and then caught the subway home— sweet funky Canal and Broadway home. May the old and the smelly, the historic and the dilapidated, of Canal and Broadway never change!