Art in DC

My wife Sylvia and I like going to art museums, so we hit three of them in DC. We went to the Hirshhorn Museum on the Mall. It’s somewhat shabby and run down now, and had a boring ugly show of supersized kakaist canvases and assemblages by the bombastic artist Anselm Kiefer.

The best work I saw in the Hirshhorn was “Video Flag” by the pioneering video artist Nam June Paik. I tried unsuccessfully to photograph it; it’s a wall-sized grid of TVs showing some synchronized tapes Paik made, the garish patterns arranged to resemble the stripes and star-block of the US flag. In the star-block he had a series of 3D models of recent US presidents, the faces shiny and unblemished like plastic or, more to the point, like Silly Putty, for the faces were algorithmically morphing one into the other, LBJ into Bush into Reagan into Clinton and so on. “Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.” The effect was unspeakably sinister. And Paik doesn’t have to tell you it’s serious, in fact he presents it as if its light-weight pop mental junk-food; the display room even has a big comfortable leather couch you can veg out on to watch the tube for a few minutes. See it if you can, as eventually Paik’s works tend to stop working and they don’t always get repaired, what with the parts being obsolete, and, sadly, he’s dead now.

We went to the National Gallery too, which was great. This photo is of Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant’s Favorite of the Emir in the National Gallery. There was another deliciously corny series of canvases, The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole.

The National Gallery building is a people’s art temple, really the best place of all to visit in DC. Good new cafeteria downstairs in the tunnel to the new East Building too.

As an anti-terrorism measure, Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House is closed off to traffic now, and has a run-down deserted feel. Like in the sixties and seventies when cities would try to enhance their shopping districts by turning them into pedestrian-only zones — and the effect was always to utterly kill the blocks. US cities seem to need vehicle traffic to live.

All the government buildings in DC are being ringed with heavy-duty steel bollards anchored to cement, so as to keep out suicidal truck-bombers. It’s depressing to see us under siege like this. And of course it’s the “fault” of the terrorists. But couldn’t we have asked even once after 9/11 what it is that the terrorists actually want? Couldn’t there be some way of finding peace with them instead of jumping into an eternally escalating tit-for-tat?

Union Station is pretty nice now, that’s one of the few things that actually seems better than it used to be. What’s healed it? A Metro stop and a retail mall of chain stores.

Driving through Northern Virginia it was kind of disturbing how every single store is a chain store. It’s like living in a cheaply made virtual reality. There’s a big chain of bars called Ruby Tuesday, it’s so dystopic to see a classic Stones song brought this low.

We ducked into the Library of Congress. They have this beautiful ceiling with vaults and domes and spandrels, all painted with representations of: authors, branches of literature, and golden quotes. A real hodgepodge; it’s so hopeless to categorize human knowledge. What really cracked me up was that, among the muses depicted is that of the genre “Erotica,” a lush pouting woman with her toga pulled off her shoulder. Are our moral watchdogs in Congress aware of this outrage?

The heat and humidity in DC is astonishing. Even late at night, to walk a few blocks is to find yourself swimming in sweat. Lots of people are rushing off to work in suits in the mornings.

It’s nice to have all the Black people around, and to hear their voices. I noticed some of the women have a new (to me) way of doing their hair; they braid most of it tight onto their scalps, and then do something fun with the hanging part in back — actually that hair in the back might be hair extensions.

One woman had hers poufed out into a broom; another woman had hers braided into four tight reddish plaits, giving the over-all effect of there being an octopus sitting on her head.

At another point I watched a pickup brass band of Black youths playing on a traffic island beside Dupont Circle. Trombones mostly, and a tuba or two, inexpensive band instruments, shiny on the inside, dull on the outside. Nice to see the street lights sweeping across the reflective inner horn bells. Black hole dynamics.

We hit the Phillips Gallery at Q and 21st Streets, an old favorite; we used to go there when we were courting in the mid 1960s. One work that caught my attention was Daumier’s painting of a barker touting a strong man. I love the frantic way the barker points at his star, and the way the strong man looks so cool and confident. I think of someone writing an introduction for a book.

And a cool Kandinsky that was originally exhibited alongside some examples of Chinese calligraphy. A great series of glyphs. I like the idea of there being a language of this kind; I often imagine that’s how telepathy would be, that is, compound images or sensation-blocks, the units representing thoughts rather than being phonetic representations of spoken words.

One National Gallery picture that lingers in my mind is Fra Angelico, The Healing of Palladia by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian. I'd like to use this composition in a painting. I didn't get that good a photo of it, but the National Gallery has just about all their pictures online.

So I’m back in CA, thinking about marriage, birth, and death. I was in Virginia for my son’s wedding, our granddaughter’s first birthday, and a visit to my father’s grave. This life is all there is.

Congratulations, Rudy and Penny!

Life is sweet.

A couple of days before the wedding, my big brother Embry and I visited my father’s grave in Herndon, VA. It was very satisfying, and brought me some long-wished-for closure re. Pop’s death. His funeral in 1994 lacked a proper burial service — even though Pop was an Episcopal priest — and I always felt bad about this.

So Embry and rode there with the Book of Common Prayer, and we read the Rite for the Burial of the Dead, taking turns on the prayers, and saying some of them together. It felt good. Such beautiful language. And if Pop’s in any way able to notice it, he would have been so glad. We reminisced about him, and I patted the stone and said, “You were right, Pop,” thinking of some of the advice he’d given me, and Embry chimed in, “You were right about everything, Pop.”

Not only a wedding and a funeral, but our granddaughter’s first birthday! She's amazing.

We had a little party at a friend’s house in Charlottesville. It was very jolly. (This is the baby's aunt!)

A wedding is an emotional peak. When you climb a mountain you’re high enough to see the other peaks clearly, standing out from the foothills. And here at Rudy’s wedding, I could see my wedding with my wife, and our parents’ weddings, and our other children’s weddings.

I see the funerals of our parents and the funerals yet to come. I see our births, and the births of our children and the births of our grandchildren. All these peaks are out there, visible from this exalted moment. And, oddly enough, each of those peaks is in some sense the same peak; and all the great events of our lives are here in this one moment.

Life is a mystery. And so we celebrate, and we open our eyes to notice how touching and tragic and beautiful it is to live this life, with its weddings, its deaths, and its births, generation upon generation.

Sweetest of all, this moment was real, all of us are together in a this lovely grassy meadow beneath a wedding tent in Orange, Virginia.

God bless us all.

I’m going to take a couple of weeks off from blogging.

Meanwhile here’s something I wrote for Postsingular this weekend, taking off from that outline material I posted last week.

The clothes on display were funkier than at home, each item unique, and everything very colorful. Things weren’t so industrialized here. The leathers and wools, in particular, were individually tweaked by craftspeople called coaxers. Some coaxers got into close telepathic synch with an animal so as to influence the colors and textures of the creature’s skin or hair. Other coaxers worked at affecting the tints in plant fibers such as cottons and linens. As well as affecting the physical qualities of natural materials, coaxers also worked at getting animals and plants to imbue their substances with certain psychic properties.

One shop, for instance, had developed a way to deal with the nosers and pervs who liked to teep inside your clothes. They’d developed silk underwear that emanated unsettling angry-silkworm vibes whenever a mind delved inside. And then they’d leapfrogged the notion to produce undies whose denunciations were in fact designed to position the wearer as forbidden — and therefore alluring — fruit.

Down the block, some well-dressed Highbraners were enjoying a late lunch in a cozy restaurant. Their meals contained huge amounts of information. Each plateful of food was teep-tagged with the history of how the ingredients had been produced, with images of the chef’s preparation process, and with annotations on the order of : “Especially crisp and lemony right here;” “Pry here to get a nice nugget of meat;” or “Be sure to dip this in the sauce.”

Next door was a bar, but Thuy couldn’t teep inside. For the protection of the drinkers, their vibes were screened off by aggressive mental stylings being broadcast by a dazzler. The dazzler was visible in the doorway, a black swami with a shaved head, sitting with muscular arms crossed, and wearing a calfskin coaxed to resemble a leopard pelt. He was like a living internet hub, sending your attention off into contact with the most interesting minds of the nonce. You never made it past him to the interior of the bar.

Thuy noticed a hooker exiting the bar with her john. Teeping in, she picked up the hooker’s name: Balla. Balla’s vibes were an education in themselves; she’d honed the skill of offering her short-term partners the emotional sense of intimacy and shared history — magically divorced from empathy and commitment. Just seeing Balla slowly brush her hair, Thuy had the brief impression that she knew Balla really well, and that Balla was very fond of her — though of course the illusion was as thin as the skin of a balloon.

Deeper abstractions of emotionality were on offer in an art gallery across the street from the auto clinic. Teeping in, Thuy saw some physically non-descript roundish sculptures that were teep-tagged to project the most remarkable states: sense of wonder, raw transcendence, sensual pleasure, the presence of infinity. They were like smooth rocks bearing with them the vibes of years in the bed of a woodland stream, although here the flowing waters were the currents of the gifted artists’ minds.

Near the spot where Metotem Metabooks had stood was something like a bookshop. But it held no reams of paper filled with printed words. Although the telepathic Highbraners could use spoken speech, they seemed never to trouble themselves with writing things out in phonetic form. Highbrane authors were something like cartoonists, blocking out networks of somewhat self-contained mental states. Their books were networks of teep-tag glyphs; and the tags were embedded not in pages, but in plants, stones, scraps of cloth, medallions and pottery cups.

Picking up on Thuy’s vibe, the owner, who actually looked a bit like a giant Darlene, stepped slowly from of the store. “You’re fresh from the Lowbrane?” she boomed, then switched to teeping. “I’m Durga. And you’re a novelist? Would you like to record something for me to sell?”

“Go ahead, Thuy,” urged Ond. “Show Durga what you showed us. It was beautiful. And it’ll enhance understanding between the braneworlds.”

“If we come in, will you give us a snack?” Chu asked Durga.

Durga gave them mugs of tea and enormous spice cookies. Nibbling her cookie, Thuy picked up the vibes of the far-flung islands where the tea and spices had grown. Taking a few minutes to get it right, she arranged her mental representation of Wheenk along the seemingly endless spike of memory that the curious topology of Highbrane space had given her. And then she teeped the images and emotions across to Durga and onto, of all things, five potted cactuses on Durga’s window sill.

“If I sell off all these cactuses, I can make second-impressions,” said Durga. “Or if you’re still around, you can make fresh first-impression ones. But I have a feeling you’ll be going soon.”

Later.

Chapter Four is well underway now, I have about 4,500 words on it and a pretty good outline. It’s the same routine all day, day after day. Write a page, print out what I have, mark it up, type in the revisions and maybe write another page, print it out. Now and then I have to take a break to figure out what’s next. I print out the outline and revise that. Or take a nap.

I’m going to hang out on this blog entry for a week or two, just re-revising it and hoping comments accumulate.

Right now Thuy, Ond and Chu are walking down Highbrane Valencia Street. They’re about one foot tall relative to the Highbraners, and they move six times as fast as the Highbraners. Like speedy gnomes.

It’s Christmas Eve (we have Jesus who died on the Cross, they have some unnamed figure who died on the Triangle and is symbolized by a cuttlefish, not a lamb), and people are out shopping. They’ve had telepathy forever in the Highbrane, also they can teleport themselves at will, also they have omnividence (can see anything), and they have endless eidetic memories. And the objects are telepathic too, although they don’t speak English. I’ll use “teep” for a verb to mean “using telepathy.”

Due to telepathy, people have a better control of morphogenesis, and can tweak organisms to take on desired forms. A shop where a guy grows you the kind of tropical fish or mushroom or orchid you want. Teasing a growing plant or animal into a sought-for shape is a delicate craft. I would call the people who do it shapers, but Bruce Sterling has made that word his own. So call them coaxers.

Question: what’s for sale in the stores?

What’s the street scene like?

The buildings are organically grown, or rather assembled from organically grown parts. The windows are like membranes. Parts from a Victorian tree farm. Branches that look like trim.

I’m thinking they have cars for cruising around and carrying stuff even though they have teleportation. But maybe the cars can be flimsier as it’s pretty hard to run into someone by accident, as you can teep them. The cars can in fact teep things themselves and avoid collisions. They are assembled from morphogenetically grown parts.

The buildings and cars aren’t organisms yet, not like in Frek and the Elixir. They’re assemblages of bio-like parts. The cars know what kinds of parts they need, the mechanics teep with them. Maybe the cars scavenge for spare parts sometimes, perhaps stealing from each other. Azaroth, Ond, Chu and Thuy have their secret meeting in a room over such a garage. The mechanics know they’re there, but don’t bother to squeal.

Clothes stores. Clothes are for warmth and decoration. Not really much point in modesty, as you can see under the clothes. But people are kind of used to that. Maybe sell hush-undies that scold teepers who nose under them, though not talking in words — as I suppose our objects don’t speak language — just reacting with anger and scolding and shame. Of course, for some, hush-undies could make the hidden contents seem forbidden and therefore extra-alluring! Blush-hush.

Food markets, restaurants. If we have telepathy we can really watch the chef. Maybe there’s someone with such a great sensitive palate that it’s pleasure to mind-meld with them as they chow down. Or the food talks to you, showing you its past. You’re eating with the chef’s whole sense of the process, the preparation, and as you eat it, the chef’s eye guides you, he’s put teep-tags onto the food.

Would people still get drunk and high? Sure. Imagine the havoc you could wreak getting wasted and “running your brain” instead of just email or phone or conversation. So there are bars that are “screened” so you’d be unlikely to teep out of there and get yourself in trouble.

Screened by overriding musical stylings provided by a black guy with shaved head, sitting with muscular arms crossed, wearing a leopard pelt, he looks like Mandrake the Magician’s assistant Lothar.

Sex work? Well, with telepathy, everything’s free. But you could have a mind that really welcomed you in, and that might be different. Someone who is actually glad to see you. I’ve read that high-end prostitutes talk about johns wanting a GFE (girl friend experience). They won’t be hitting on little gnome Thu, but she’ll witness them trying to pick a guy up. Alternately, imagine a stuffed plush animal — not even a sex-toy — just an object that loves you and is glad to see you.

Art. A painting that decides what you want to see and shows you that. But I’m not supposing objects are all that smart. An object that simply projects the raw experience of transcendence or sense-of-wonder. Groundless euphoria, mindless pleasure, a vision of actual infinity. Or sensual beauty. Perhaps a rock that’s lain in a stream bed and you look at it and sense the lovely currents of the water.

Books? Maybe no books? I could suppose the telepaths won’t actually use language that much. But that would make them too alien, I think. So they have language for superficial small talk, but they more often use teeped images and emotions. They barely use the written language. Books are normally not written in words, they’re rather like hieroglyphs. A beautiful mind loop saved into the endless memory network, glyph by glyph. Writing is more like being a bas-relief sculptor. An array of teep tags. Perhaps there’s a book store like Metotem Metabooks run by a woman who’s just a bit like Darlene from the Lowbrane. And they let Thuy record her memories. Darlene gives Thuy a spice cookie, and she sees the Spice Islands.

Ads. Things projecting vibes of paranoia to get your attention. Or anger or lust or ecstasy: the whole palette of extreme emotions.