2008-07-06T11:49:31Z http://georgesnyder.org/atom.aspx Quick Blog tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-06-28:c290a884-146e-4434-b477-62884a7d5b20 George Snyder 2008-06-28T10:20:10Z 2008-06-28T08:14:00Z 1904.  Aldin, a British artist and illustrator whose work encompassed sporting and hunting and rural life, golfing and animals, especially dogs, also contributes in 1904 to The Studio Magazine and illustrates "A Dog Day" also by Walter Emanuel and "Stories from Puppyland" in the Piccaninnies Picture Pocket Book series.
 


Cecil Aldin.  Detail of "The Falllowfield Hunt Breakfast at the Three Pigeons," one of six (?) images in the Fallowfield Hunt series, circa. 1900.

People so often ask, why 1904?  There are the cosmic, historical, and metaphorical reasons.  And then there's the personal:

Before the move to Ohio (about which I have written at some length, previously), we lived in western Pennsylvania in an old and picturesque and fairly isolated white clapboard farmhouse, circa 1800, across the (unpaved) road from the ruins of a paper mill in the woods where a branch of the creek once ran, hence the name Paper Mill Hollow.  There was a small orchard next to the house which was surrounded by ancient black walnut trees, under which I spent hours playing, when not also exploring the woods and orchard and creek, all the while entirely unchaperoned.  It was a kinder, gentler time.  Eisenhower was president.

Over the fireplace in the kitchen, (yes, it was that kind of old house) a large reproduction (probably from the 20s or 30s) of Cecil Aldin's Hunt Breakfast hung.  Was it wallpaper you could buy?  I don't know.  

    Kitchen, Paper Mill Hollow, circa Eisenhower era.  Detail.  Note Cecil Aldin.  December, because of Christmas decorations on mantel.  Sword (portion of which is visible hanging above the hearth) belonged to a relative who died in Andersonville, retrieved by another relative who went looking for him.  Cropped from image is an unflattering shot of yours truly, celebrating an early birthday.  I have just tackled a piece of cake.  Frosting and crumbs everywhere.  Not pretty.

The Fallowfield Hunt series is not specifically 1904 but I think we can safely say it's in the ballpark, and so I ask you, if your earliest and extremely vivid memories were of a hunt scene like this, and because you lived in a relatively remote and rural setting and you were not to be thoroughly socialized until you went (with great reluctance) to school but until then you only had the (sometimes unreliable and unverifiable) word of your siblings to go on and so you were forced to fall back on your own conclusions regarding the Real World which lay beyond Paper Mill Hollow, as fueled by your fertile imagination, then I ask you: what would you think?  What conclusions might you draw about Life?  What expectations might your impressionable mind come up with, in terms of the kind of grown-up existence you might hope to enjoy one day? 

Exactly.  I rest my case.  As you can easily appreciate, I was in for something of a shock.  What's more, I must confess that on some level I remain to this day not a little ambiguous about the value of the real world versus the one in which I once fancied myself participating.  Of course I had no idea what those men were rushing through their hearty repast to go off and do.  But I liked the idea that whatever was going to happen would include lots of dogs and some horses.   And I liked the outfits. 

I am about to depart for a family reunion -- in Saugatuck, Michigan -- with my siblings and their spouses and their children and their respective spouses and offspring, and so understandably I am not only feeling old but waxing a little nostalgic.  The Aldin pictured above is long gone, along with the house which was "accidentally" burned to the ground by a subsequent owner who acquired the property with an eye to development and plowed roads in for several more structures although he did manage to save and renovate the barn.  No one in the family lives in Pennsylvania now.  Or in Ohio either, for that matter. 

In any event, you can appreciate how differently life might have turned out had some other kind of image from some other era by some other sort of artist greeted me at every meal.  For instance, I once met a lady who'd filled her dining room with works by the artist Raoul Dufy.  Very decorative, and a striking contrast to Aldin in terms of the dining experience, as I think you'd agree.  Or there's the Peacock Room about which I've written in these pages.

Now just imagine being a small child and staring at a local farm equipment retailer's calendar with a John Deere tractor on it, every morning while you ate your Cheerios.  Or a reproduction of that painting of dogs playing poker.  Or how about a stencil pattern of alternatng windmills and little girls in bonnets.  Or avocado green appliances.  Or copper jello molds.

Art and beauty matter.  It's no wonder we turn out the way we do. ]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-06-24:d577cadc-5fa7-4770-a50a-67b4f543da7d George Snyder 2008-06-24T07:12:03Z 2008-06-24T06:31:00Z
 

Jean-Léon Gérome (1824-1904). CORINTHE.  1903/04.
Original polychromed plaster and wax, H: 18 2/3 IN; W 13 IN; D: 11 3/4 IN. 
EST 200,000 - 300,000 EURO; 315,000 - 470,000 US$

Provenance: Directly from the studio of the artist and thence by descent.

"The carefully tinted plaster -- with a wash of pale rose under a layer of warmer flesh tones -- perfectly embodies three central themes of Gérome's art: his life-long purusit of the illusionistic nude, his championing of coloured sculpture and the contemporary fascination with the Antique..." Sotheby's catalogue description.

Lot 38 de la Vente Tableaux et Dessins du XIX Siele.  Sotheby's Paris 25 June 2008 17 H 30.

Just when I thought I was out...

Having announced only yesterday that I would be more dilatory in my postings and here I am back again.  Yet I could not forgive myself if I let you miss the opportunity to acquire this exquisite work of art, and as my dear friend J. wrote (from his hotel on the Champs Elysées weeks ago and I just came across his note this morning reminding me), "Should anyone doubt the importance of the year 1904, you have only to show them this [sculpture by Gérome].  I saw her and can attest to her beauty and importance."

So I urge you, as a souvenir of The Year When Everything Important Happened, run don't walk to 76, Rue du Faubourg, Saint-Honoré.  But hurry.  The sale is a demain!

And for news of an entirely different order and magnitude, bone-crushing even, in its own fashion, may I suggest a look at No Talking Cure.]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-06-23:d74a7d3a-9840-440d-b980-1da43c71d1f8 George Snyder 2008-06-23T09:43:38Z 2008-06-23T09:23:00Z

Shakespeare Garden, The Huntington Library and Gardens.

As I may have mentioned previously in passing, with the one year anniversary of 1904, I have decided to explore other avenues of expression.  I will continue to post here but with perhaps less regularity than those of you devoted readers have come to expect.  Do not delete me from your blogroll, however; do not write me off yet.  I will be back. 

I will also be posting at a new blog site, No Talking Cure, which offers you a slightly different perspective on a variety of subjects, sacred and profane.  

In the meantime, and until we meet again here in the fullness of Time, I remain
your humble servant
in the sunlight of the spirit
in the fellowship of the blogosphere
in the arms of the Divine
in the One Consciousness
in the year when everything interesting happened,

1904]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-06-20:6e0004d9-30be-4be7-bb6e-8bb30be6f098 George Snyder 2008-06-20T09:36:00Z 2008-06-20T07:20:00Z Archer Huntington founds The Hispanic Society of America at Audubon Terrace, in 1904.  Archer was Arabella's son by her first marriage to a Mr. Worsham, adopted by her second husband Colis P. Huntington who was the uncle of her third husband Henry Huntington who married Arabella in 1913 when they were both in their 60s. 



Now I see through an Arabella darkly... My partner in near-crime, RJK of The Daily Blague, reflected in the Visitor's Center display at the Huntington Library and Gardens, 19 June 2008.

Arabella's intimidating portrait by Sir Oswald Birley (maternal grandfather of Loulou de la Falaise, muse to the late Yves Saint Laurent) hangs in the entrance hall of the Huntington Library in San Marino (read Pasadena) California.   Her grim visage staring out of widow's weeds and horn-rimmed glasses, however, could not intrude on my great pleasure in escorting my good friend RJK on our pilgrimmage to peek at the Ellesmere Chaucer and to visit the newly renovated Huntington mansion with its portrait collection which includes the international favorites Pinkie and BlueBoy and also starring Georgiana Duchess of Devonsire along with many other illustrious and pink-cheeked English.  Also of note was Arabella's extensive collection of Sevres porcelain which has been removed from the hard-to-view vitrines in a dark back service hall in the library and is now beautifully displayed upstairs at the mansion, where it can be more easily appreciated.  Heaven.

The day's adventures did not stop there however, but continued in a leisurely drive via surface streets through downtown Los Angeles and points west until we reached MacArthur Park, where as you are doubtless aware more than just cakes melting in the rain has been known to transpire.  Needless to say, the two of us with our easy virtue and devil-may-care appreciation of British art and decoration were sinister figures on the scene.  My equally suspect vehicle, a curiously un-pimped-out ride (not even a low-rider and lacking tinted windows) quickly drew the attention of an alert LAPD officer on motorcycle.  His speedy and decisive use of alarm and colored lights quickly drew attention to our potentially unsavory presence.  Not only pedestrians but independent entrepreneurs and vendors paused in the midst of their business transactions involving home-made recreational drugs and fake identification cards to watch as I threw caution to the wind and threatened whiplash with my prompt and complete curbside stop. 

As I was soon to discover, my passenger is a feisty and no-nonsense New Yorker unused to the customs and conventions of travel in this part of the country, who commenced to reply to the officer's attention-getting rap on the window and subsequent interogation with a spritely and brisk tone which, although it would be unfair to characterize as belligerent, was in marked contrast to my own more obsequious and one might even argue servile, grovelling, and abject demeanor as I begged the officer to consider the fact of my passenger's recent arrival in our great city and his obvious infirmity, both physical and emotional -- here I swirled a finger at the side of my own head and explained that I was on my way even then to seek medical attention for him but if it pleased the officer I could also just as easily send him straight back to where he came from, the sooner the better in fact, and good riddance, I swear, right now, he's leaving, doesn't know what he's saying, pay no attention, I barely know him, I just picked him up by mistake, total stranger, never saw him before --

"He has to put his seat belt on," the officer explained calmly, ignoring my blatant attempt to throw my friend under the bus.

And then, because there is a God and Miracles are Everywhere, with but a passing and largely unnecessary remark about my driving ability which was evidenced in how I narrowly avoided a fatality in stopping (which I would argue was at his insistence, but nevermind), he let us go with a warning.  No ticket.

As the image of newschoppers overhead capturing my person spread-eagled face down on the pavement, surrounded by a crowd of people chanting in their colorful native language for justice and my swift execution -- while this image slowly faded from mind, I can say that RJK and I continued our on our way with a figurative lightness in our step, in heady spirits, rejoicing even, enjoying our excellent adventure, secure in the knowledge that our safety is uppermost in the minds of those in whom the power to protect is vested, and also grateful and relieved not to have added "felon" to our resume, or another "strike" to our respective rap sheets.  ]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-06-17:fc454d80-9040-4fac-921a-e57684eaecda George Snyder 2008-06-17T08:32:05Z 2008-06-17T07:17:00Z

Sotheby's catalogue of the sale of Contemporary Art, New York, November 5 and 6, 1985.  Cover lot 67A: David Hockney.  Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, acrylic on canvas, 83 1/2 by 119 1/2 in. Painted in 1968. Estimate upon request.  The Property of Andrew Crispo Gallery, Inc. sold for the account of Rosenthal & Rosenthal, Inc. 

The wrap-around cover illustration puts Bachardy on the back. 

I'd forgotten this catalogue -- which also includes a number of items from the collection of Francois de Menil (including a fabulous rhinoceros desk and a pair of camel couches by Claude Lalanne) and a few glorious works by Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) and others -- until I went looking for it after being reminded by MW who sent me this article by Richard Lacayo.  I'd forgotten Andrew Crispo too.  

In his article about the film on Isherwood and Bachardy (cited also in earlier posts, see below) Lacayo references the English marital portrait tradition and then suggests that looking at paintings of couples can tell us things about the subjects and their relationship.  From the double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy, for instance, one might infer "even more scenes from this marrriage than the [current] film lets us in on." 

Of course, the very best art should do exactly that; it should provoke us and inspire us to seek beyond the frame, so to speak, and look beyond the surface, where the truth (in my experience) seldom lies.  I would even say you ought to look at the broader context, at the setting and the times and the provenance of the art work.  Who made it and when and for whom and how well did they all know each other?

I was just thinking about this because my good friend RJK of The Daily Blague is coming out here to visit, and has expressed an interest in visiting The Huntington, and I am especially anxious for him to see the famous portraits of Pinkie and Blue Boy.  You really have to see them in person.  Those of you who only know the Paint-By-Number version or that cheap reproduction on an old postcard sent to you by your Uncle Frank who moved to California in the 50s and never married and your dad gets mad when you ask about him and your mom changes the subject -- well, you just don't know what you're missing.  You have to see these works of art in context, and it helps to know something about the art dealer Duveen who sold them to Huntington and about Huntington's quest to build a New Albion on the West Coast and in so doing he wound up owning more portraits of dead English people than you could shake a stick at.  You see?  There's much more to Art than meets the eye.]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-06-16:ecd9b7b8-07cd-4607-9a78-1d7b215fa11d George Snyder 2008-06-16T06:33:26Z 2008-06-16T06:15:00Z

     Yes.

And the one year anniversary of this blog.

There was so much I thought I would want to say today.
Preparatory to anything.]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-06-15:ac8bac56-8a91-4f8f-a548-607eda009d92 George Snyder 2008-06-15T17:52:46Z 2008-06-15T08:31:00Z

Billboard, corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, advertising the LACMA exhibition of photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia now through September 14th 2008.  This image of "Todd," from the series the artist made in the early 90s of male hustlers he met on Santa Monica Boulevard, in L.A.

Part Two.  Sacred and Profane?

A friend of mine, many years ago, posed for the artist Don Bachardy.  Although uncomfortable whenever I see my friends naked, I could not help admiring a reproduction of one of the finished studies.  I think the artist successfully captured my friend's likeness, at least insofar as he must have looked when he was a very handsome and very young man.  Parts of him were lovingly rendered in rather fine detail.  "You look..." I paused, searching for the right word.

"Bored," my friend said, completing the thought for me.  "People say I look tortured and full of anguish and all that.  But trust me, I was bored.  Plus Chris hung around the studio the whole time I was there."

"Isherwood was there?" I asked.  I shivered as I contemplated how much less than six degrees (and how many years) separated me from a writer I had long admired.  My friend nodded.  

"Sure," he said.  "You don't think he was going to leave us out there by ourselves, do you."

I had no idea, actually, but I felt a pang of identification with the famous writer as I thought of what might have been Isherwood's angst, even uncertainty perhaps, peeking in on his (much) younger lover with his young (naked) model.  After all, a thirty years difference existed between Isherwood and Bachardy.  And as I've grown older I have not become immune to the charms of youth, and so I confess I was imagining Isherwood (and myself) in the role of the Marschallin (played by Schwartzkopf) in Der Rosenkavalier.  

Of course I can't be certain whether Isherwood experienced anything remotely like what I might have felt in the same circumstances, and my friend (who is the soul of discretion) declined to speculate with me and was not forthcoming in details.  Which I confess I find a little disappointing.  I am not a sex tourist; there is more to my interest in the lives of celebrities than what they do or did in bed.  Unless they've made a point of drawing attention to it themselves, in which case I don't feel my curiousity is entirely prurient.  In any case, my experience has taught me that, generally speaking, most old friends, artists' models, kept boys, courtesans and second wives are all notoriously flattering in their accounts of their intimate history with the rich and the famous.  If they've been treated well.  

The ones to look out for, as you are doubtless aware, are the young and the poor.  The young because they'll outlive you and determine your posthumous fame, and the poor because they probably won't get to have their say, being disenfranchised and all, but God help you if they do ever find a voice.  I was thinking this just the other day while visiting the exhibition of Philip-Lorca diCorcia's work at LACMA.  These hustlers and pole dancers who are the subjects of many of his photographs are mute, but in their silence their faces are the faces of the young and the poor and in that way they manage to tell us something -- about our world, and about what it's like to get by in it, what you have to do to survive, what it costs.  In so doing they say something about all of us, really. 

None of which, however, is what I wanted to say about Isherwood, or about divine consciousness and Love and the Sacred versus the Profane and what you or I are doing in this world or in any other world.  My own guru is coming to town this week.  Somehow because of that, I was so sure I would have something meaningful to say --something important about Art and Faith and Desire, and possibly something about how the older generation has a responsibility to the younger, a duty that goes way beyond lust or envy or projected regrets or sanctimonious wisdom by virtue (specious reasoning) of being older.  "Suffer the little children," is what Jesus said.  "We are all God's kids," another wise man has explained, and I for one hope so.  Because it is so easy to forget and objectify youth.  We all know how Desire drives the Internet (well, porn does).  But the Internet also gives a voice to young and old, rich and poor alike.  A cacophony of blogs and opinions and images and voices and truths and sex and lies and videotape.  Which I for one believe is a good thing.  A Pandora's Box, to be sure.  But released from that casket of noise and horrors, along with everything else -- let us not forget -- came Hope.

Part of the diCorcia exhibtion is a display of one thousand Polaroids the artist culled from his collection and arranged in a series of rows on three walls.  A thousand images, quickly taken, quickly thought about and not intended for posterity but created as a preliminary gesture toward a later and more final, studied composition, a trial shot ... the overall effect is somewhat overwhelming.  And yet what the eye does is seek a pattern, and a repetition and a rhythm -- your eye searches out meaning.  Which is what I think Hope is, and we can't help it.  We look in the chaos of color and shape and composition, in the details, in the arrangement, in the random and not-so-random, in the eyes of strangers and children and in the clouds and in the shadows, for what is true.  We look for the meaning.  The thinking that we'll find it is the point of it all.  The hope comes in the seeking.    ]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-06-13:5989e2f4-c0d0-46b6-a17f-1d7cee736160 George Snyder 2008-06-13T09:53:05Z 2008-06-13T06:26:00Z My visit seems to have coincided with a resurgence of interest in Isherwood and the release of a film "Chris and Don: A Love Story" about Isherwood's life with the artist Don Bachardy.  In turn, the film (as films do) has triggered memories and recollections of people who once knew the famous couple.  My friend the writer Roman Hans has just recounted (yesterday and today) an important meeting he had as a teenager with Chris. 

Part One.  Sacred and Profane



I met Chris and Don in New York in '81 or '82 at a book signing at Three Lives Bookstore when the store was still on Seventh Avenue.  "October" written by Isherwood, with drawings by Bachardy had been published by Twelvetrees Press in Los Angeles in 1981, and the two of them inscribed a copy to me and Skip. 

I don't remember the early 80s terribly well, but I do remember that Skip and I were living then just down and around the corner from Three Lives, on Sheridan Square.  Of course, at that point Swami Prabhavananda (1893-1976) was dead, Gerald Heard (1889-1971) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) were both long dead, but I didn't know who they were and wouldn't until years later.  I don't think anyone we knew had died yet.

At that point, although life was something of a blur for me, it was a relatively pleasant drug-and-alcohol-fueled blur.  I was living with Skip, a man I adored, admired, occasionally feared and deeply loved, in a tiny, crowded -- some might say 'tenement' but we said 'charming' -- apartment in the West Village, crammed to the ceiling with books.  I had an interesting -- some might say 'too interesting, too exciting' -- life, and I would not crash and burn for another five years.  And what a five years they would be.  By 1986 when Christopher Isherwood died of prostate cancer, Skip and I would both quit our jobs and leave New York, Skip would be sick, by which point friends and colleagues and acquaintances would all seem to be getting sick and dying, I would be committed to a locked psychiatric ward, and Skip would be dead the following year.

And everything after that, you might say, changed.   

So how do you sum up a life? How do you describe a relationship? A film like "Chris and Don" addresses these questions and prompts us to ask the same, and not only about the lives and relationship revealed (or not revealed) in the film, but about our own lives, our own relationships.  Of course we may have less to go on, by comparison.  In some cases we may have very little, maybe not much more than a book inscription when it comes down to physical evidence.  Maybe less.  But we can still ask. 

My mother only met Skip twice, briefly and admittedly when neither of them was at their best.  But shortly before she died, a couple years after Skip died, she said what was probably one of the nicest things she ever said to me. 

"I have lost a child and I have lost a husband," she reminded me.  Which she had -- my older sister and my dad -- and sometimes it seemed like her favorite game to play besides "I've Got a Secret" was "Can You Top This?" which she would always win, because just like Joan Crawford said to Christina, she was older and she could, and life was not necessarily fair. 

"But I want you to know," my mother continued on this occasion, "that I have never lost someone who meant to me what Skip meant to you.  And I wanted you to know that I am sorry for your loss."

See, first of all, she wasn't trying to win this round of one-upmanship, not this time.  And she wasn't trying to pretend she understood, or make my life with Skip into something conventional, something she could easily comprehend or place in some conventional context.  "I just want you to be happy," she used to say in the old days, until I pointed out that what she thought would bring me happiness (marriage, children) was not in the cards for me and not what I wanted anyway.  So this time, she was acknowledging that she didn't understand, which was her way of honoring my life and my experience and my desires and my path.  And I appreciated that, more than if she had said, "I know what you went through," or "I know just how you felt."  Whether she really did or didn't isn't the point.  Sometimes it's okay to be told you're unique, that you aren't like anyone else.  And sometimes it's okay to tell someone you don't understand, but you're holding a place open in your heart for where that understanding ought to be.

    "What draws singular lives together in the first place,"

as the poet Auden (who had a relationship with Isherwood too, don't forget), wrote, and then goes on to name some possibilities --
 
    "loneliness, lust, ambition, or mere convenience,"

    "is obvious, why they drop 
    or murder one another
    clear enough; how they create, though, a common world
    between them, like Bombelli's
    impossible yet useful numbers, no one
    has yet explained."

["The Common Life," in About The House, W.H. Auden]

Of course, Skip and I never had to try and pretend we were father and son, like Chris and Don did.  There wasn't a thirty year age difference between us.  We were the same age in fact.  But that's another issue entirely.  That's for another time.   ]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-06-09:86fa263e-2797-4bfd-aa99-22d757b8bd6b George Snyder 2008-06-09T07:54:38Z 2008-06-09T06:25:00Z Master of the Mysteries by Louis Sahagun].



Sunset over Hollywood, Sunday 6/8/2008.

There is a reason California ends up being home to visionaries and mystics.   Some say it has to do with the psychic energy of ancient lost civilizations lingering here.  Others say it's because the heart of the world has shifted from India to southern California.  Still others claim it's about the weather.  Whatever the cause, people on all kinds of quests, spiritual or the kind that involves a half-finished screenplay or a headshot and a dream, seem drawn here.  Marie Bauer Hall's quest was to obtain help in unearthing a vault of treasure and secret writings she believed Sir Francis Bacon had buried beneath Wlliamsburg, Virginia.  Marie was unsuccessful in her efforts but devoted much of her life as Manly Hall's wife to this end.  In the mystical scheme of things, it is not surprising to me that she was born in 1904 or that she wound up in L.A.

Marie is but one of the many 1904 associations I discovered this weekend on an Esotouric Tour of Visionary Hollywood, organized around Erik Davis's fascinating new book The Visionary State. Erik, author of "Techgnosis - myth, magic + mysticism in the age of information" (Harmony Books, 1998) maps "the peaks and faultlines" of mystical California and was a delightful guide to a few of the more arcane sites around town.  

In addition to Manly Hall's Philosophical Research Society, designed to look like a Mayan temple, we visited the Krotona Inn apartments (a Theosophical Society compound from 1912), the Vedanta Society of Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, and Gerald Heard fame, the Aetherius Society (a UFO-oriented spiritual group whose leader Rev. George King channeled aliens as well as Jesus) and by comparison the more down-to-earth cloistered nuns of the Dominican Monastery of the Angels, who sing and chant constant adoration of the Virgin Mary and make a delicious pumpkin bread.

More is to come on this magical mystery tour.  Suffice to say, however, that as I paused at the "Magic Hour" last night, after reading (devouring) Louis Sahagun's comprehensive new book on the life of Manly Hall, I reflected as I admired the view out my window that I truly do live in a strange and wondrous place.  For as you know, I have an abiding interest in the metaphysical and what one might describe as the Spiritual Path Less Traveled, and I too felt myself drawn to California, if not by some unseen mystical force then at least by someone willing to pay half the cost of the U-Haul truck.  To show my enthusiasm at the time and my commitment to the adventure, I even dispersed many of my earthly belongings after the fashion of a pioneer woman throwing things off the back of that Conestoga wagon to lighten the load and get us over the Rockies.  Without really understanding why, I was that anxious to get here. 

Now I understand that some of us will go to any length in our quest for self-realization, will sacrifice a great deal to achieve higher levels of consciousness, and risk nearly everything to know God.  

Or to find buried treasure, the secret doctrines of the ages, and Eternal Truth.

Or get a new boyfriend.  Or new girlfriend.  Or Fame.  Or Fortune.

Or Love.   ]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-06-04:4f44acd6-851c-4055-a864-99aec0078407 George Snyder 2008-06-04T08:07:47Z 2008-06-04T05:52:00Z
 Parfum Celui de Jean Desses

Date of birth tells us the era you were meant to influence; date of death that point at which you cease to have quite the same effect, and the hyphen everything in between.  Which is not to say you don't live on afterward -- a person's good deeds and good works if not good intentions certainly can and sometimes do have their impact.  If you are Jean Desses your timeless creations worn by beautiful women years after your death, remind people of who you were.

All of this, of course, as a way to remember Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008) whose death this past Sunday brought to mind the ways in which a single life can shape an era, make a difference, leave behind a legacy.  For some of us, his passing represents the end of an era, not just in fashion and haute couture but in the larger world of art and beauty and culture.  I was talking to my friend Nick who was driving on the 101 Freeway the night we got the news.

"Before him, you know," I said of Saint Laurent, "dresses stood up by themselves, there was so much whalebone and structure to them." 

"He got rid of all that," Nick said.  "He revealed the woman's body," meaning that Saint Laurent took over from Christian Dior (1905-1957) and dispensed with all the padding and constricting foundation work.

"He was a tortured genius," I added.

"He gave women pants," Nick continued.  "And the Russian peasant look."

I wondered aloud if Paris would remain calm.  We both thought of Cathy Deneuve, and Lulu de la Falaise and Betty Catroux.  Nick mentioned the recent antics of a younger generation of designers who should be more careful of their health and their behavior in public and then announced he would wear orange shorts with a pink belt the next day to work, as a special kind of mourning and tribute.

The New Thought or modern metaphysical movement teaches that because everything is God, then everything is part of one universal consciousness, and you are part of that consciousness and therefore perfect.  You are not born in sin, you are not some flawed or damaged item from God's production line, to be discarded, (or fixed or saved), or otherwise inferior to his higher end creations; you are perfect whole and complete just as you are and just like every other of God's creations, by virtue of being a part of the infinite Mind of God.  And since God is perfect, every one of you is perfect, just as you are, all appearances to the contrary.  And the perception that you might somehow not be enough just as you are is a result of the limited thinking and narrow perspective of Man, who is just not seeing the Whole Picture.

Now, whether or not you believe it, you have to admit it is a comforting way of looking at things.  As I was saying recently to D, however, it does not stop you from wanting to do something or create something or give the world, like Jean Desses or Yves Saint Laurent, something that would survive or be remembered after you are gone.

"You want to make a dress," D. said, with a tentative tone of dismay or disbelief, it was hard to tell which.

"No," I quickly corrected him.  "But you know, I thought for a long long time that if, you know,  I published a novel, then that would be my gift to the world, that would be my legacy.  And then I would finally be somebody."

"Well that's your mistake," D. said.  "That last part.  About being somebody."

Of course I understood what he meant.  Thinking anything outside of myself would make me feel complete, make me feel whole or acceptable or "somebody" is indicative of a sense of spiritual lack that nothing external is going to fix. 

"But the desire to create," I argued.  "Or the urge to give somebody a gift..."

"Oh that's something different," D. explained.  "That's not what you said.  Giving something and wanting to be somebody as a result are not the same thing."

"Okay, okay then," I conceded.  I could see how wanting to publish and get a lot of attention so that people would say, "God, and here I always thought he was such a mess, I had no idea he could write" is not the same as "What a lovely gift, how thoughtful of you, darling, thank you."  

And I had to agree that this goal -- to justify your worth with something as dicey and creative an effort like fiction -- was a futile and largely doomed enterprise.  Especially if all you want out of it is validation.  If all you're looking for is the permission to be allowed to stick around or be accepted, be a part of, be good enough.  Sort of like buying your mom that fancy bottle of perfume at Woolworth's and thinking that somehow it would finally clinch the deal and guarantee you everlasting approval or forgiveness or unconditional love.  

"Not a novel then," I said and added a humble chuckle, as if I hadn't really been serious about it in the first place.  Then I hesitated.  Perhaps there was room for negotiation.

"How 'bout a poem?"]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-06-01:617da1fd-eff3-42d7-95af-f3cf38369f3e George Snyder 2008-06-01T07:29:28Z 2008-06-01T06:28:00Z une crosiere au Spitzberg, yacht Maroussia," in 1904 [Paris, Imprimerie de Chaix, 1904]. 



The current Orléanist Pretender is Henri comte de France and duc de Paris, whose nephew Charles-Philippe d'Orléans duc d'Anjou will marry his beautiful fiancée Diane duchesse de Cadaval this month.
 
Or if you prefer, the Bonapartist imperial succession goes to the very handsome young Jean-Christophe prince Napoléon.

So June already, and the exhibition on the poor dear queen Marie-Antoinette continues until the end of the month at the Grand Palais.  Here is the latest report from our Paris Correspondent:

"Mon cher, the experience might have been too much for one as sensitive as you.  It starts on an upper level of the Grand Palais - nothing but splendour, the clothes, the portraits, an unbelievable moonlit landscape stage set for a ballet the dear queen attended, furniture, porcelain all displayed in a breathtaking enfilade, room after room while the music she had commissioned played -- heaven!  Then the spectator descends a long curving staircase to a lower empty chamber to confront a wall of shattered mirror -- very effective.  One's knees begin to buckle.  Then into the dark final rooms displaying the vicious cartoons, the pitiful crude dressing table the poor Queen was forced to use while imprisoned in the Temple, the plain sad little nightdress she wore...  The exhibition ends with J.L. David's cruel portrait sketch of her on her final journey in the tumbrel -- grown men (of a certain persuasion) wept openly -- we must never allow a Queen to be treated this way again.  Your correspondent needed two large martinis at the Closerie des Lilas afterward, and even then could barely touch his steak tartarre."

Needless to say, if you are in Paris, you don't want to miss this show.  And if you can get to Granville, I urge you to catch the exhibition at the musée Christian Dior entitled "Dandysmes" devoted to male attire.  There you will see Oscar Wilde's dress shirt and the suspenders (braces) worn by Honoré de Balzac.  And a collection of bowties displayed in a glass case like butterflies.  One is white and fluffy, one a fragile pink and white tartan, and one a deep turquoise trimmed with fur.  Another kind of heaven. ]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-05-30:9fcfde35-5229-4db7-abbd-764595608fc4 George Snyder 2008-05-30T09:49:15Z 2008-05-30T07:47:00Z Bode Museum after its first curator Wilhelm von Bode, in 1956.

 
Current reading.

The relationship between art and politics is complicated, isn't it.  Especially in these challenging times, when life and history seem to be happening so fast.  D. and I were watching "Recount," the HBO film about the 2000 election results the other night and we both kept murmuring, "I'd forgotten that," or "I didn't realize at the time..." or "Oh god, no, no no, please," or "Jesus wept."  It was almost as if, D. said afterwards in something of a tribute to the filmmakers, you found yourself hoping for a different ending.  Until you realized of course that even Kevin Spacey can't undo history.   Laura Dern, by the way, was brilliant as the mad Queen Esther Kitty Harris.

So sometimes it's just easier to photograph the coffee table and offer up some links:

Daniel Boese writes about the ceremony this week for "Germany's national monument for homosexual victims of national socialism" in Berlin's Tiergarten, within view of the Brandenburg Gate and the new "terror-proof" American embassy. 

Regrettably, Pierre Seel, the last known survivor of the Nazi torture of gays, died in 2005.  Mr. Seel's memoir, published in 1994, describes his arrest in 1940 and his experiences which included being forced to witness the execution of his boyfriend.  While Wagner played, the guards stripped the 18 year-old naked, put a bucket over his head and let loose German shepherds who tore him to pieces, beginning with his genitals.  The bucket amplified his screams.  

As some Californian gay couples contemplate marriage, it may be useful to recall that what happened to Mr. Seel did not take place thousands of years ago in some barbaric uncivilized past or even hundreds of years ago, and not even as long ago as 1904, but to a young man in Germany in the 40s.  Although of course that would be long ago when compared to another young man, Matthew Shepherd, who was tortured and left to die crucified on a fence in Wyoming in 1998.  

Which, even if history is happening fast, in a heart beat, is not really so long ago at all.  ]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-05-28:3016c8da-1f3e-44fb-a62a-5b318a2fd000 George Snyder 2008-05-28T09:02:01Z 2008-05-28T06:23:00Z


Sandringham, which the Duke of Edinburgh has recently allowed to be photographed for the first time.  Not quite what Muthesius had in mind, but in the ballpark. 

The next time someone makes a disparaging remark about 1904 being an arcane and unmarketable exercise (as opposed to blogs about being a working mom or a Japanese school girl which get book and movie deals) with a limited and narrow focus of only marginal interest to a select few, I shall raise my clenched fist with a copy of the London Review of Books rolled up in it, because the current issue [Vol 30 No 10, 22 May 08] contains not one but two articles upon which pivotal date their signficance hinges.  First is Impervious to Draughts, Rosemary Hill's entertaining review of the new and full English translation of Hermann Muthesius' seminal work on The English House.  As Rosemary points out, it took a German to appreciate what, at the turn of the last century, the English were doing in domestic architecture.  Variously described as "Old English" and "Queen Anne," the English houses Muthesius admired "obeyed no strict stylistic rules but drew intelligently on history ... adopting the tile-hanging, red brick and half-timbering, the large chimney stacks and little leaded lights of the past and turning them into something new and comfortable."  Although Sandringham is at the high end, so to speak, let us not forget that Edward VII designed the house for a relaxed lifestyle and even had a bowling alley incorporated for Queen Alexandra who enjoyed the game.  Talk about comfort.  The point is, Muthesius wanted to understand what the English had done "and he was prepared to consider -- as the English themselves, with their dislike of abstraction, were not -- how all the elements connected." 

"How all the elements connected."  Only connect, as the great novelist writes in Howard's End, "Only connect the prose and the passion."  ("Live in fragments no longer.  Only connect..."  Chapter 22). 

And if 1904 does not offer this connection, (as if, hello, that were not the entire enterprise in the proverbial nutshell!), I don't know what does.  And if this alone were not sufficient evidence, the very engaging and talented poet and memoirist August Kleinzahler reviews [All There Needs to Be Said] a biography of Louis Zukofsky which begins, "Born on the Lower East Side in 1904 to Russian Jewish parents, Louis Zukofsky spent his entire life in New York City, reading and writing and doing as little else as possible..."

Actually, much more can be said [and will be, in a future post] of Zukofsky's enviable life (who doesn't want to read and write and do as little else as possible?) and work, including his monumental 800-page poem "A" but for the moment, besides encouraging you (again) to run out and pick up Kleinzahler's memoir Cutty, One Rock, (which is not about Zukofsky but about Kleinzahler and also about his gay brother in the Mafia) I think it is now abundantly clear that 1904 is indeed the year everything interesting happened, and therefore, Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case.  ]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-05-26:e86de615-efe7-4738-996a-6d0d32a8a31e George Snyder 2008-05-27T08:06:12Z 2008-05-26T07:08:00Z 1904.  A professor at Wellesley College as well as a poet, Ms Bates lived for twenty-five years (1890 - 1915) with fellow professor and social activist Katharine Coman in a Boston Marriage.



A Memorial Day Parade from days gone by. 

There is so much ground to cover when you're talking about America; more than lots of people ever get to see.  Just this weekend we're driving down to Costa Mesa when my buddy Jim confesses he's never been to Newport Beach, so naturally I insist we stop there for lunch.  The Balboa Peninsula is, in my opinion, one of the nicest places you could find to keep your yacht and have a second home on the west coast, if you could afford to.  I had in fact spent many pleasant weekend hours with my big brother who could do just that a few years ago, touring the inlets and channels around the man-made islands in his boat.  As you can imagine, when you grow up on the Great Lakes, Newport is definitely nice.  Top of the line.  It doesn't get any better, as they say.

Of course without a boat you don't get quite the same effect, and perhaps in the spirit of the holiday I'd built it up a little too much, but I was not prepared for my friend's reaction. "But what do people do here?" he asked with an unmistakable tone of incredulity and even dismay.

"Why, lots of things," I explained.  "Take a ride on your boat."  I looked around us as we walked down the main thoroughfare off shops and restaurants.  "And shop.  And eat.  And drink."

He eyed the other pedestrians and the shops.  "I see white people," he said, like the kid in The Sixth Sense.

I admitted it was pretty Republican.  Everyone around us had blonde hair.

"Ten points," he said, "if you see a gay couple.  Or a person of color.   Or a gay person of color."

"Look," I said, trying to distract him and pointing to the attractive varnished harwood benches spaced neatly down the narrow albeit charming tree-shaded sidealk.  "The men sit here and the women go in the stores and buy things.  Then you eat and go back to the boat."

We cross the gender line and go in a store, crammed to the brim with decorative accessories and books by Bunny Williams who, it must be said (and Jim does) makes Martha Stewart look like a felon.

"Can't breathe," Jim whispers hoarsely, clutching his throat.  I blame the Casswell-Massey display and usher us out.

The next shop has an extensive offering of nautical paraphernalia -- brass ship's bells and needlepoint pillows with jaunty boating expressions ["All Aboard!" and "First Mate"] and jewelry boxes covered with seashells; the one after that carries a line of hand-blown Christmas ornaments and a bevy of finely crafted carollers in velvet and lace and rich plaids, "hand-made in Pennsylvania," we are informed.  "I know you need a few more carollers for your collection," I observe to Jim.

"Can't... breathe...." he replies.

"You know," I explain when we are outside the store and he is self-consciously lighting up ("I'm the only person smoking," he points out, and he's right), "You know there was a time my brother suggested I sell a screen play and make a fortune and buy a house with a dock here so he could have a place for his boat instead of the yacht club -- as you can imagine, the slip fees can be exorbitant ..."

"You can't be serious," he snaps, and I hasten to add that okay, the part about the screenplay was a bit of a stretch perhaps but --

"You'd drink yourself to death by the Fourth of July," he predicts.  I argue that he's being ungenerous.

"This is the American Dream," I insist.

"This is not normal," he corrects me.  Then, taking pity on me, he adds, "Okay, so I have cousins in New Canaan who'd probably think it was nice."

"See?" I say, encouraged.  "I mean, it isn't at all like that silly show O.C. made it out to be, except for being in Orange County and the idle rich and hanging out on yachts and ..."

"It's not really America, though," Jim insists.  We are back at the sign that welcomed us onto the island: "Land of the FREE BECAUSE of the BRAVE," it says.

"Isn't that supposed to be, 'Home of the Brave'?" he asks.

"It was Land of the Free and Home of the Brave when we were being inclusive and we were all free AND brave because we had not yet become Red States Versus Blue States and arguing about who was Not Supporting the Troops," I explain.  I do not add that this was back when George still drank and Laura still smoked and we all smoked and drank and the Clintons were in the White House.  It seems like a thousand years ago now.

"Let's go home," my friend announces wearily. 

Home is only about fifty miles as the crow flies.  Not that far, and a world away.  Not even as far as the purple mountains.  Not even all the way to the amber waves of grain. 

Oh spacious skies.]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-05-23:9f79ac4f-515d-473a-a75c-707ccd8a981c George Snyder 2008-05-23T08:01:35Z 2008-05-23T07:06:00Z fifi voleur.  Which means thief.

 27 rue de Fleurus.

I went to visit B. yesterday in her father's apartment which is very much like this picture of Gertrude's, but more so, with pictures up to the ceiling and hung on doors and dark with the drapes pulled against the California sun (except there hasn't been much to speak of yesterday or today) and lots and lots of groupings of Louis Seize and occasional tables and stools and rugs and throws and objets d'art because her father is 99 and has been collecting for a long time and so there is a great deal to admire everywhere except in B's studio which is white and spare and therefore refreshing and admirable in a different way, like an oasis in reverse.

I have been rereading Gertrude Stein's Wars I have Seen which she wrote in Bilignin during the German Occupation of France and I have been toying with doing an entry on Stein again (there was one before a long time ago I think) but the problem with Stein is she is so imitable I finally realized I had to do something quickly because otherwise I might slip into her syntax and get stuck and go mad.  Why, you ask, and here I say, here is why, here is the first line:

"I DO NOT KNOW whether to put in the things I do not remember as well as the things I do remember."

Which as you know is a sentiment I strongly identify with and struggle with all the time.

And then here is Stein on 1904, writing in 1943: "...the Russo-Japanese [1904] war completed the work of Christopher Columbus, it made the world all one, it made the East no longer a mysterious something, not so much later any American woman could make a home for a year in Pekin and then go home again to America just as she might go to Paris [which Stein did in 1904] or to California, and so the work of Christopher Columbus was fnished, the North Pole was found and the South Pole was found, and the work of Christopher Columbus was over and so the nineteenth century which had undertaken to make science more important than anything by having finished the work of Christopher Columbus and reduced the world to a place where there was only that, forced the world into world wars to give everybody a new thing to do..." 

Stein is also extremely quotable, as you know, along with being imitable, but most of all, it is her writing about being in the midst of a war and the midst of an enemy occupation which makes the book worth reading, and it would be interesting to compare the Wars I Have Seen with the wars I have seen and experienced in my life or in yours, from this vantage point, the point of view of the 21st century. 

Because she writes, "...history does repeat itself, I have often thought that that was the really soothing thing that history does.  The one thing that is sure and certain is that history does not teach, that is to say, it always says let it be a lesson to you but is it.  Not at all because circumstances always alter cases and so although history does repeat itself it is only because the repetition is soothing that any one believes it, nobody nobody wants to learn either by their own or anybody else's experience, nobody does, no they say they do but no nobody does, nobody does. Yes nobody does."

History is soothing and does not teach and nobody wants to learn from experience, yours or theirs.  That alone is worth stealing, isn't it.  fifi voleur, c'est moi.]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-05-20:87fa756f-455e-4a5f-bbdc-34ca8d65c010 George Snyder 2008-05-20T08:50:41Z 2008-05-20T07:32:00Z Idina Sackville. 



Stormy weather.  El Monte, CA.

Sylvia, of course, is just an excuse to get to Idina, "[t]he child of conventionally irresponsible, moneyed parents from a family dating to the Conquest, lovely, weak-chinned Idina [who] haunted the bars and ballrooms of Edwardian London like a character in fiction.  She was inseparable from a black Pekingese named Satan, cultivated a more than slightly dangerous image, and married one of the youngest, richest and best-looking of the available millionaires a year before the Great War broke out," as the Oberver describes her in its review ("Decline and fall of a flapper" 04.05.08) of the recent biography by Idina's great-granddaughter. 

And this was all before she moved to Kenya.  "In an age of wicked women, Idina pushed the bounds of behavior to extremes." (Frances Osborne, "The Bolter").

As you might imagine, the 1904 associations are abundant: Idina's best friend Barbie Lutyens -- daughter of the architect and sister to Ursula who is born in 1904 -- runs off with Idina's husband; Idina's other best friend "Dickie" is Lady Morvyth Ward, daughter of William Humble Ward, 2nd Earl of Dudley (1867-1932), who is Lord Lieutenant of Ireland 1902-1905 and makes an appearance on his way to the dedication of a church in Joyce's Ulysses on June 16, 1904.  Dickie's sister is Lady Alexandra Patricia Ward (1904-1964) who never marries, perhaps as a consequence of seeing what her sister's friends could get up to.  Idina married five times, not to mention the affairs.  Her bed was known as "the battleground."  

"The Bolter" of course refers to the mother of the narrator of Nancy Mitford's (1904-1973) Love novels ("Love in a Cold Climate," "The Pursuit of Love" and "Don't Tell Alfred.").

By 1955 Idina was dead from cancer. "She left behind half-a-dozen hairbrushes, several pots of cold cream, scent bottles with silver trimmings, nail files, a glove-stretcher, a cocktail dress and a large, black taffeta bow." (Obersever, ibid).

As my dear friend Justin wrote, "What more do you need?" ]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-05-18:c5b92899-0b7a-411a-8276-b0038bfab9bc George Snyder 2008-05-18T15:17:05Z 2008-05-18T06:45:00Z

The view this morning.  See the jacarandas?  You should scroll down and see yesterday's.

I could just stay up here and be Emily Dickinson, couldn't I; never leave my room and take pictures from the window.  Lower a basket on a rope to the garden so the maid could put my lunch in it and sit here and write poems you would find stored away in a shoebox when I'm gone.  

Except there's no garden down below and no maid and no one to send up lunch and I gave up poetry a very long time ago.  Still, blogging is the equivalent of a shoebox full of scribblings and snapshots, right?  Meanwhile, the view...

Last night Jim and I went to the Egyptian for a screening of "Vertigo" by the American Cinematheque.  Believe it or not, I'd never seen it. 

"Go up the stairs, Judy.  Go up the stairs."

Seeing Jimmy Stewart driving a DeSoto around San Francisco fifty years ago shadowing a blond Kim Novak was certainly worth the price of admission.  Plus it's so rare you get to be delighted by something this old.  Like the very first time you watched Lassie dash into a burning barn and you really don't know if she'll be able to save Timmy who's been knocked out unconscious and ... 

As with so many of life's experiences, the suspense can be almost unbearable.  The first time.  

Then we came out onto Hollywood Boulevard where neither of us would normally dream of venturing on a Saturday night, and it was both colorful and terrifying.  The bright lights.  The tourists.  The young girls all dressed up to look like cheap whores and the boys with their pants falling down and looking like hungry juvenile delinquents, which many of them doubtless are.  "Do you want to buy a Bong?" Jim asked as we stood before a garish window full of them, swirly Venetian blown glass erotically shaped.  We had frozen yogurt instead from a PinkBerry knock-off next door.  Teenaged girls lounged out front with bleached blond hair and way too much mascara and rhinestone jewelry and miniskirts, smoking and chewing gum and making polite conversation with the older guy who swayed nearby, drinking out of a paper bag and leering.  All I could think was, somewhere in Ohio or Indiana there are mothers who are lying awake, who haven't slept in years, hoping against hope against this very scene.   Praying like Judy's mother back in Kansas that it would all work out, that she'd get a job in a department store and meet a nice man and even if she dyed her hair and let him buy her clothes, it wouldn't end badly.  

"Hitchcock sort of hated women," I observe to Jim.  "Marnie, Judy/Madeleine, chasing Tippi around with all those birds..."

"It's more complicated than that," he replies. 

"Still, there's something going on.  Sean Connery roughhandling Marnie, Jimmy forcing this transformation on Judy..."  I think of that moment when Bernard Hermann borrows from Wagner and Kim emerges from the bathroom in a mist, the swelling of the orchestra toward that final Liebestod crescendo as she walks into her closeup...

"And are you trying to say you've never been there, never done that?" my friend Jim asks.  "Never pursued someone who looks like someone else, or requested special outfits," he continues.  "Or how about a certain look?  A particular haircut?  Maybe even specially scripted dialogue?"

Unfortunately, Jim knows I have not always been Emily Dickinson locked in my room.  And of course he has a point, and there just might be something important here, about desire, or managing desire, the nature of desire, if we only had all the pieces.  

But we're just wandering, like the characters in "Vertigo" keep saying when people ask.  We return to his car, which is parked under a jacaranda tree.  I brush at the fallen lavendar blooms.  "It's more complicated than that," I explain.   ]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-05-17:81f1b4f0-cef1-45dd-8831-72b885e229d3 George Snyder 2008-05-17T11:33:59Z 2008-05-17T08:21:00Z this site included Teddy Roosevelt, Lord Baden-Powell, Lord and Lady Cranworth, the Baron and Baroness von Blixen and the Earl of Warwick, the latter presumably the 5th Earl whose wife, Daisy Greville Countess of Warwick, was mistress to Edward VII among others.



The Jacaranda are in bloom again, such a strange and wonderful flower.  Here seen on Wilshire Blvd at Norton.

If you search "Jacaranda + 1904" you get the Norfolk, which is down the street from the Jacaranda Hotel and apparently you can see these lovely trees in bloom in Kenya as well as southern California.  Lilac and hyacinth in color and when the flowers fall they end up smelling like cat piss.  Don't park under one...

With so many of you flung to the four corners of the earth, as it were, it's hard to know where to begin, there's so much to tell.   It's gotten very warm again, for one thing, which I know everyone prefers to the unseasonable June gloom, except for me.  At my social club last night I got caught up on all the local news: Xtopher is recovering nicely from surgery and reading The Beautiful Fall about St. Laurent and Lagerfeld in the 70s ("Men wore makeup, students rioted..." as one review described the era), whereas ARH recommended the memoir "Life Itself!" by Elaine Dundy who wrote "Dud Avocado."  ARH knew both Elaine and her sister Shirley Clarke; their father invented the Phillips screwdriver.  Then H. who has dual citizenship announced she was moving to Ireland because her partner of 14 years who does not have the same staus H. enjoys has now exhausted her visitor's and other sundry permits, and H. said it isn't worth the fight anymore for them to stay. 

It always gives me the funniest queerest feeling when I hear people talking about having to leave the country.  Like the first time I heard of American citizens seeking political asylum (in Canada, but of course they've disappeared now).  Earlier in the day we'd been talking to Bernard in Paris and we asked when he was coming to visit, and he said it was "trop difficile" these days to obtain the permit to come as apparently the US still puts the French through their paces to visit.  Or it may simply be that Bernard who lives in "la plus belle ville du monde" as he likes to remind us, has no burning desire to leave.  I guess, however, really what I'm put in mind of are the stories of people trying to escape (or failing to get out) of wherever it is they happen to be as the situation deteriorates -- say like, you know, Saigon or Berlin or Shanghai or yes, even Paris once upon a time.

I asked R. the other day where he thought I should try to go if things got really bad.  Provided, of course, that I could still get out of L.A.  "Higher," he replied.

"You mean higher as in North?" I asked, thinking Canada.  I had thought of trying to get to Canada, in fact.

"A Higher Plane of Consciousness," he clarified. 

"Oh," I said.

He seemed a little annoyed I hadn't yet figured out that geographically speaking, no where is truly safe these days.  Even T. said, calling from Japan, that it seems so odd, everyone being patriotic and nationalistic when the truth is, the "disaster capitalist complex" (that elite group of corporations who profit off disaster and war, the arms dealers, the gun-runners, the private security/mercenary army firms) have allegiance only to themselves and move their headquarters to places like Dubai when the questions cut too close.  Don't Americans understand that? he asked.  Don't they see they're being duped?

I meant to ask him if there are jacaranda trees in Japan, but then I forgot.  Still, not to end on a sad note, look!  Brisbane is another place to see the beautiful jacaranda.  At the opposite time of year, of course.  If you can get there.  ]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-05-15:875cf6db-e655-481b-a840-3596bf6673aa George Snyder 2008-05-15T08:49:13Z 2008-05-15T07:52:00Z


There are mountains out there, but you can hardly see them.

If a Google Search for Crowley has brought you here, I recommend Timothy d'Arch Smith's entertaining work, "The Books of the Beast" (Crucible Press, [London] 1987) which includes essays on Aleister Crowley and others from the point of view of a bookseller with an interest in the occult.  [Ed. query: has anyone read d'Arch Smith's "Alembic"? Plz. advise]. 

You see, all I'd intended to do this morning was mention the Tarot, in passing, because I drew a card the other day in answer to the question, "What should I be working on in the next six months?" By the way, I don't even use the Rider-Waite deck (I prefer "The Mythic Tarot" by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene, illustrated by Tricia Newell).  And I had no plans to get into the subject of Crowley at all but the next thing I know I'm reading Timothy and distracted and completely off track and now it's time to wrap up and move on to other pressing matters and I think this all points to the power of the subject matter and the chaotic energy swirling all around us.

So much has been going on.  Not just quakes and cyclones with their dreadful toll but people being away (T in Japan, J in London and now off to Paris, E in Miami) and uncertainty and confusion in all directions, what with the SAG contract due, and the upcoming handful of primaries left and then eventually the election, and the price of gas, and the continued increase in the rate of foreclosures although they keep saying the worst is over (except the people who say that's not true at all), not to mention having to go to the gym by myself because E. is in Miami.  Crazy.

So in answer to the question, "What do I need to be working on?" what card do I draw?  Strength.

"On a divinatory level, the card of Strength... implies a situation where a collision with the lion is inevitable, and where a creative handling of one's own rage and senseless pride is desirable." 

Oh dear.  ]]> tag:georgesnyder.org,2008-05-12:3a2eec39-4bfa-47f0-9bc5-2d15369f3244 George Snyder 2008-05-12T08:04:21Z 2008-05-12T06:45:00Z


The view from here.  June Gloom except it's May.

Judge Troward starts off with a discussion of the distinction between Spirit and Matter.  Between the Living and the Dead, the Eternal and Unlimited Realm of Thought versus the Limited, bounded Realm of Things.  Because he's a judge, his argument proceeds in that dry, logical legal way that lawyers and judges use.  There you have it, says Judge Troward; Heaven and Earth, God up there in the Eternal and Unlimited, Man down here in the World of Time and History and Limitation.  And what does Man do?  He prays from his small dead already-formed world to the unlimited realm of the eternal present.  But if you really wanted something to happen or to come into being, wouldn't you want to turn it around?  Wouldn't you be better off praying (imagining, seeking) from the Unlimited into the Limited?  From the Eternal into the World of Form? 

In other words, reverse your direction.  Don't look around at what is and wish it would change; instead, put yourself in the realm of the unlimited (Thought, God, Spirit) and believe that what you want already exists.   "It shall be done unto you as you believe."

And don't look at me like that, I'm just telling you what I've read.  So far.

I'm also reading John Cowper Powys's Glastonbury Romance (published 1932) which I picked up at the B.H. Library on Saturday and am now thoroughly enjoying.  It also deals in a wonderful (but not especially legal or lawyerly) way with the process of how the Realm of Spirit works on the World of Matter.  In Powys, the Sun and the Moon and Mother Earth are terribly powerful and deeply affected by how mankind thinks and behaves.  Here, for example, is what happens when two of the characters are longing to make love but can't:

"The strongest of all psychic forces in the world is unsatisfied desire.  And the desire of these two at this moment, gathering electric force out of the atomic air and striving blindly towards each other in despite of the sundering flesh, was so caught up and so heightened by the frustrated desires of two thousand years, which in that valley had pulsed and jetted and spouted, that it did actually draw near to that Secret Thing.  Thus the loves of these two people, both of them hostile to all these miraculous forces [in Glastonbury], both of them rooted in fen-mud and vicious heathenism, did...approach the invisible rim of that wind-blown mystery..."

I know -- I don't really understand it either, but I can hardly wait to find out what happens!  ]]>