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"I Reach Your Hand to be Your Clay"
16 years ago
22 February 2010
15 January 2009
Untitled
sipping coffee
maybe not enough half and half
something smoky about the taste
watery, and yet it reminds me
of the way clove cigarette smoke
fills your mouth and numbs your tongue
on the way down
maybe not enough half and half
something smoky about the taste
watery, and yet it reminds me
of the way clove cigarette smoke
fills your mouth and numbs your tongue
on the way down
12 May 2008
Port of San Diego Public Art
Artist proposals for the lighting of the iconic Coronado Bay Bridge are due in less than a month, and then the Port of San Diego Public Art Committee’s work will really begin. June 6 marks the end of the submission period and the beginning of the selection process for the Port’s signature project, in which they are collaborating with CalTrans and the City of Coronado.
The pressure is on for the committee and the artists alike, as this project is intended to be the public artwork to represent the city.
“With all of the artwork that’s been done in San Diego, the response has consistently been, ‘Well, what does that have to do with San Diego?’ or ‘That doesn’t represent San Diego,’” said PAC Director Catherine Sass. “None of those pieces has ever been intended to do that, to be an icon for the city, but clearly that’s something the community desires… Over the years membership at the PAC has discussed their desire to use some of the money to have an iconic piece or a signature piece.”
In 2003 the Port started looking for a site around San Diego Bay. It quickly became an obvious choice, said Sass.
“The icon for San Diego is the bridge, and it’s also very meaningful because it’s regionally visible… It’s a great site,” Sass said.
Lighting the bridge is anticipated to cost approximately $2-3 million for the design, fabrication and installation. That amount must cover all project fees including artist and consultant fees, materials and fabrication costs, installation, site-preparation, traffic control costs, legal fees, insurance, permit fees, taxes, travel-related fees, and documentation of the project.
The Public Art program is funded by a set-aside of 0.5 percent of the Port’s projected gross revenues each year, and by dedication of 1 percent of project budgets on all new construction, according to Port bylaws.
“Our job is… to bring people down to the waterfront to support these businesses, and… to make it more engaging for people to come and use the tidelands for recreation. The art fits hand in hand with that,” said Sass. “Most of our money comes from the [port] tenants.”
The program’s annual income, however, is only about $750,000 and must also cover operational costs and fund other public art projects like the Urban Trees, which is budgeted at $140,000, and the North Embarcadero Picnic Tables, at $6,000.
The rest of the funds for the bridge lighting, then, are expected to come from grants, none of which the PAC had secured to date. In fact, the PAC set aside only $50,000 for the bridge project initiation, which included developing the project parameters, marketing, and receiving artist’s submissions, though this period is supposed to include around $75,000 (or up to $15,000 each) for the five semi-finalist artists/teams to further develop their lighting proposals. This is before any of the proposed pieces have been selected, manufactured, or installed. A timeline for installation of the piece, once it is chosen, has not been determined yet.
The PAC applied for a grant through CalTrans, with whom they’ve partnered on this project, but they did not receive it, according to Jocelyn De Piolenc, executive assistant to the PAC, but they’re still optimistic.
A finalist in the project selection should to be chosen by November, though if no additional funds can be secured the bridge lighting will have to be shelved for the time being.
“Let’s not think that way!” said De Piolenc. “We are expecting to get regional funding in support of this project but no, there’s no Plan B if that doesn’t happen.”
The pressure is on for the committee and the artists alike, as this project is intended to be the public artwork to represent the city.
“With all of the artwork that’s been done in San Diego, the response has consistently been, ‘Well, what does that have to do with San Diego?’ or ‘That doesn’t represent San Diego,’” said PAC Director Catherine Sass. “None of those pieces has ever been intended to do that, to be an icon for the city, but clearly that’s something the community desires… Over the years membership at the PAC has discussed their desire to use some of the money to have an iconic piece or a signature piece.”
In 2003 the Port started looking for a site around San Diego Bay. It quickly became an obvious choice, said Sass.
“The icon for San Diego is the bridge, and it’s also very meaningful because it’s regionally visible… It’s a great site,” Sass said.
Lighting the bridge is anticipated to cost approximately $2-3 million for the design, fabrication and installation. That amount must cover all project fees including artist and consultant fees, materials and fabrication costs, installation, site-preparation, traffic control costs, legal fees, insurance, permit fees, taxes, travel-related fees, and documentation of the project.
The Public Art program is funded by a set-aside of 0.5 percent of the Port’s projected gross revenues each year, and by dedication of 1 percent of project budgets on all new construction, according to Port bylaws.
“Our job is… to bring people down to the waterfront to support these businesses, and… to make it more engaging for people to come and use the tidelands for recreation. The art fits hand in hand with that,” said Sass. “Most of our money comes from the [port] tenants.”
The program’s annual income, however, is only about $750,000 and must also cover operational costs and fund other public art projects like the Urban Trees, which is budgeted at $140,000, and the North Embarcadero Picnic Tables, at $6,000.
The rest of the funds for the bridge lighting, then, are expected to come from grants, none of which the PAC had secured to date. In fact, the PAC set aside only $50,000 for the bridge project initiation, which included developing the project parameters, marketing, and receiving artist’s submissions, though this period is supposed to include around $75,000 (or up to $15,000 each) for the five semi-finalist artists/teams to further develop their lighting proposals. This is before any of the proposed pieces have been selected, manufactured, or installed. A timeline for installation of the piece, once it is chosen, has not been determined yet.
The PAC applied for a grant through CalTrans, with whom they’ve partnered on this project, but they did not receive it, according to Jocelyn De Piolenc, executive assistant to the PAC, but they’re still optimistic.
A finalist in the project selection should to be chosen by November, though if no additional funds can be secured the bridge lighting will have to be shelved for the time being.
“Let’s not think that way!” said De Piolenc. “We are expecting to get regional funding in support of this project but no, there’s no Plan B if that doesn’t happen.”
ARTSea Cafe 2008
“POP!” goes the art Saturday at 6pm as A Reason to Survive hosts its fourth annual ARTSea Café fundraiser, once again at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla. Two artists and 12 performing chefs are slated as the evening’s entertainment, along with music by the 80Z All Stars, at this year’s pop art-themed gala.
ARTS is a non-profit organization that uses art to help children dealing with adversity, founded in 2001 by Matt D’Arrigo after art and music helped him deal his mother and sister’s simultaneous cancer diagnoses in the early 1990s.
“We are here to provide the supplies and equipment, the volunteers and support, the structure and curriculums for the children to create on their own and share the same experience I did,” said D’Arrigo.
D’Arrigo founded the organization with $5000 and a book on starting a non-profit seven years ago. Now he is one of San Diego Magazine’s 50 People to Watch in 2008, among several other accolades, and the organization is hosting events like ARTSea Café, which in previous years has netted a total of $240,000 for the program.
“I have seen ARTS grow from a one-room office with solely outreach programs to a 7,000 square foot facility with classes here every day,” said Jenna Mohler, events and marketing coordinator for ARTS. “I think that ARTS offers such a different and valuable program to these kids, allowing them to express themselves through art, no matter what they are feeling. It is such a great feeling to see what I do directly affects the kids, growing them personally and giving them a sense of self-esteem and self-worth.”
ARTS accommodates children facing anything from terminal illness to divorce to a deployed military parent, but there’s not really any other requirement such as financial need. Any child from any income bracket or background can qualify.
“The children have to be facing some kind of difficulty,” said Dana Nitti, ARTS development director. “We keep that pretty broad. It’s about the emotional needs of the child, not financials.”
Once children qualify for, or are referred to the program, according to Nitti, they get started in all kinds of free art classes, rotating through the various media available at the Pat D’Arrigo ARTS Center, ARTS’ own facility at the Naval Training Center Promenade in Point Loma, which opened a little over a year ago. The center was named for D’Arrigo’s mother, who died of cancer less than a year after being diagnosed. Children can get involved in the visual arts, performance arts, and literary arts. Some homeless teens have even been hired to work in the children’s art gallery and framing business run by the center.
In addition to artistic resources, ARTS now has a shuttle service to bus children to Point Loma from any of their more than 20 partner sites, which include the Ronald McDonald House, Rady Children’s Hospital, and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Linda Vista, among others. This shuttle service, dubbed Van Go, provides yet another level of assistance to the 25,000 children who have been served by the organization.
Rob Tobin, painter and ARTS’ Artist in Residence, was one of the program’s first volunteers seven years ago, having worked with D’Arrigo at Pacific Event Productions. When they opened the center, he said, they needed a full time artist and he just fit.
“[My job is to] teach kids, do community projects, murals, mosaics, drive the Van Go, take out the trash – anything that needs doing,” Tobin said.
How can an organization that provides so much on a $600,00 budget still afford to host a gala like ARTSea Café? Connections.
Scripps Institute of Oceanography has been the venue every year, at least partly because ARTS Board Member and ARTSea Café Event Chair Jill Hammons worked for more than 25 years as director of special events at Scripps.
The performing chefs and artists are mostly returning volunteers also.
“The only non-volunteer [entertainment] is the band,” said Nitti.
The art programs have directly benefitted from these partnerships as well. Two years ago Studley, a Del Mar-based consulting firm, donated 25 new Dell computers to ARTS for use in their administrative offices and media arts lab.
"We bought these computers to use at our annual company meeting and were hoping to identify an organization in San Diego that could truly benefit from receiving them as a donation," said Michael Colacino, the president of Studley, in an interview with the San Diego Business Journal.
Having this kind of assistance from community businesses allows ARTS to put a greater percentage of the funds raised on Saturday to good use.
ARTS anticipates over 300 guests at Saturday’s event, much like last year, and hopes to raise $100,000. Tickets for ARTSea Café are $150 per person and can be purchased at www.artsurvive.org.
ARTS is a non-profit organization that uses art to help children dealing with adversity, founded in 2001 by Matt D’Arrigo after art and music helped him deal his mother and sister’s simultaneous cancer diagnoses in the early 1990s.
“We are here to provide the supplies and equipment, the volunteers and support, the structure and curriculums for the children to create on their own and share the same experience I did,” said D’Arrigo.
D’Arrigo founded the organization with $5000 and a book on starting a non-profit seven years ago. Now he is one of San Diego Magazine’s 50 People to Watch in 2008, among several other accolades, and the organization is hosting events like ARTSea Café, which in previous years has netted a total of $240,000 for the program.
“I have seen ARTS grow from a one-room office with solely outreach programs to a 7,000 square foot facility with classes here every day,” said Jenna Mohler, events and marketing coordinator for ARTS. “I think that ARTS offers such a different and valuable program to these kids, allowing them to express themselves through art, no matter what they are feeling. It is such a great feeling to see what I do directly affects the kids, growing them personally and giving them a sense of self-esteem and self-worth.”
ARTS accommodates children facing anything from terminal illness to divorce to a deployed military parent, but there’s not really any other requirement such as financial need. Any child from any income bracket or background can qualify.
“The children have to be facing some kind of difficulty,” said Dana Nitti, ARTS development director. “We keep that pretty broad. It’s about the emotional needs of the child, not financials.”
Once children qualify for, or are referred to the program, according to Nitti, they get started in all kinds of free art classes, rotating through the various media available at the Pat D’Arrigo ARTS Center, ARTS’ own facility at the Naval Training Center Promenade in Point Loma, which opened a little over a year ago. The center was named for D’Arrigo’s mother, who died of cancer less than a year after being diagnosed. Children can get involved in the visual arts, performance arts, and literary arts. Some homeless teens have even been hired to work in the children’s art gallery and framing business run by the center.
In addition to artistic resources, ARTS now has a shuttle service to bus children to Point Loma from any of their more than 20 partner sites, which include the Ronald McDonald House, Rady Children’s Hospital, and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Linda Vista, among others. This shuttle service, dubbed Van Go, provides yet another level of assistance to the 25,000 children who have been served by the organization.
Rob Tobin, painter and ARTS’ Artist in Residence, was one of the program’s first volunteers seven years ago, having worked with D’Arrigo at Pacific Event Productions. When they opened the center, he said, they needed a full time artist and he just fit.
“[My job is to] teach kids, do community projects, murals, mosaics, drive the Van Go, take out the trash – anything that needs doing,” Tobin said.
How can an organization that provides so much on a $600,00 budget still afford to host a gala like ARTSea Café? Connections.
Scripps Institute of Oceanography has been the venue every year, at least partly because ARTS Board Member and ARTSea Café Event Chair Jill Hammons worked for more than 25 years as director of special events at Scripps.
The performing chefs and artists are mostly returning volunteers also.
“The only non-volunteer [entertainment] is the band,” said Nitti.
The art programs have directly benefitted from these partnerships as well. Two years ago Studley, a Del Mar-based consulting firm, donated 25 new Dell computers to ARTS for use in their administrative offices and media arts lab.
"We bought these computers to use at our annual company meeting and were hoping to identify an organization in San Diego that could truly benefit from receiving them as a donation," said Michael Colacino, the president of Studley, in an interview with the San Diego Business Journal.
Having this kind of assistance from community businesses allows ARTS to put a greater percentage of the funds raised on Saturday to good use.
ARTS anticipates over 300 guests at Saturday’s event, much like last year, and hopes to raise $100,000. Tickets for ARTSea Café are $150 per person and can be purchased at www.artsurvive.org.
07 June 2007
'Tough Luck, Ladies,' by Katha Pollitt
Originally printed for The Nation's June 25, 2007 issue:
Do you know how much your colleagues earn? I thought not. You probably know more about your co-workers' sex lives than you do about what's in their pay envelopes. Unless they volunteer the information, or leave their pay stubs lying out on their desk, it can take years to learn that someone else is being paid more than you for the same work, if you ever do. My lucky break came decades ago at another magazine when I was inadvertently mailed someone else's check. How often do the postal gods help out a worker like that?
Do you know how much your colleagues earn? I thought not. You probably know more about your co-workers' sex lives than you do about what's in their pay envelopes. Unless they volunteer the information, or leave their pay stubs lying out on their desk, it can take years to learn that someone else is being paid more than you for the same work, if you ever do. My lucky break came decades ago at another magazine when I was inadvertently mailed someone else's check. How often do the postal gods help out a worker like that?
But now, ladies--and all of you whose color, religion or national origin leave you open to prejudice--you can just quit your fussing. In Ledbetter v. Goodyear, the Supreme Court All-Male Five just ruled that unless you figure out that you are the victim of pay discrimination within 180 days of said discrimination's commencement, it doesn't matter. You're too late. While decades' worth of previous judgments have always held that each discriminatory paycheck constituted a new act for purposes of meeting Title VII's six-month deadline, the Roberts Court holds that only the original one counts. Six months into being screwed over by your boss, pay discrimination is your own damn fault--like so much else in life! Those small initial discrepancies you suspected but accepted because you wanted the job and figured you'd fix them later when you'd made yourself indispensable? Too bad for you, Ms. Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, Mr. Gotta Show Them I'm a Team Player. You should have peeked at the white guy's paycheck sooner--much sooner. During her nineteen years at Goodyear, Lilly Ledbetter--the only woman in the group of sixteen at her level--remained unaware that her male colleagues were raking in hefty raises while she received meager ones. By the time she found out, she was close to retirement.
At least the Court recognized, albeit grudgingly, that discrimination does occur. For some time, conservatives have argued that what look like rather large pay differentials--around 75 cents on the male dollar--actually reflect women's "choices." Women earn less because they choose to become daycare workers instead of parking valets and pediatricians instead of heart surgeons; because they "opt out" of the workforce for family reasons; because even if men and women do the same work, the women show up late and go home early. They just don't care about their jobs like the men do. If you ignore everything you know about how the world actually works--something conservative economists are very good at doing--this line can even appear persuasive.
The Independent Women's Forum puts out a regular stream of disinformation to explain away unequal pay. "What they call 'choices' are not unconditioned by discrimination," Heidi Hartmann, head of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, told me on the phone. "If a woman knows a field is unfriendly to women, she is less likely to go into it. If she knows she has less chance of promotion, she may decide she and not her husband should stay home with the baby. Choices are not made in a vacuum."
True enough. But now we can forget all that obfuscatory conservative flimflam. We're back to square one: Discrimination exists--when she retired Ledbetter was making $6,700 a year less than the lowest-paid man at her level. But so what? By not figuring it out right away, by trusting your employer, by following the mossy pathways of company procedure, you've given your consent. You're almost like a woman who gets date-raped because she thought the guy was a friend. I'll bet her chances in the Roberts court wouldn't be so good either.
If we can't rely on the courts--to which George W. Bush continues to propose cave dwellers like Leslie Southwick even as I write these words (he's the one who thinks the N-word is acceptable workplace speech and that bisexual mothers should lose custody)--there's always the law of unintended consequences. A lot more women and minorities may bring suit first, rather than try to work things out politely with their employer, as right-wing antifeminists are always advising women to do if they feel, no doubt mistakenly, that they have a grievance. For those who believe the feminist movement marginalized itself by taking its eye off the dollar, this is the perfect opportunity to get back to economic issues that have cross-class appeal. Economic populists take note: You might want to add eliminating sexist and racist pay discrimination to your definition of the common good. And those who think feminism is no longer necessary might want to consider the connection between Ledbetter and the Court's upholding of the so-called Partial-Birth Abortion Ban. Putting women back in their box, anyone?
The good news is that Ledbetter is one decision that can be remedied through legislation, as Justice Ginsburg pointed out in her stinging dissent. Within days of the decision, Democrats moved to address the ruling with new legislation, with Hillary Clinton in the lead. (Hmmm, isn't she supposed to be the all-corporate big-bucks candidate who should be siding with the Chamber of Commerce on this? Maybe there's something to this sisterhood stuff after all.)
Meanwhile, wish good luck to the women of Wal-Mart in their ongoing legal battle and to the 1,500 women executives of General Electric suing the company for sex discrimination. And to Justice Ginsburg, lonely voice of sanity and justice, Centi anni!
12 April 2007
A Brief History of Journalism
The Principle of Relevance: History
"Journalism is storytelling with a purpose. That purpose is to provide people with information they need to understand the world. The first challenge is finding the information that people need to live their lives. The second is to make it meaningful, relevant, and engaging."
The principle of engagement and relevance means exactly that – journalists are asked to present the information they find in interesting and meaningful ways, but without being overly sensational.
There are two sides to this principle, however, and they must be balanced for the journalist to be successful. Engagement is what makes the story intriguing and readable. Relevance is what makes it worth the reader’s time, what makes the story important to the reader’s life. The industry has struggled to find that balance throughout its history, but studies, such as those conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, have shown that in the long term journalism that tends more toward the engagement (or entertaining) side without adequately addressing the relevant side will not be as successful.
During the Penny Press era, news consisted of little political debate and much human interest appeal. Stories focused on sex, violence, and features instead; they were sensational and engaging, but not always especially relevant to their readers’ lives. In 1851, however, the New York Times was founded, declaring its commitment to objective and reasoned journalism, and the swing toward the relevant side began. To aid that shift, the inverted pyramid style was developed in response to the strategic destruction of telegraph wires during the Civil War. Journalists had to transmit the most important, or relevant, information first in case the transmission was cut short. This style was then carried through into the post-war era.
During the period known as the era of Yellow Journalism, newspapers became for-profit ventures. Sensationalism still had a hold on the industry, with a focus on high interest stories and attention-getting headlines rather than useful information for the public. Stories focused on the mass appeal of death, dishonor, and/or disaster. In the 1890s, however, relevance made more of a comeback. With immigrants moving into the middle classes, news became more of a commodity. Sensationalism began to give way to the sobriety and objectivity of the New York Times. Two story models were in use at that time: the story model of the Penny Press and Yellow Journalism eras, and the informational model of objectivity.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, even Joseph Pulitzer’s notoriously Yellow New York Sun had become more literary. By the 1920s, though, objective style was beginning to be questioned. Objectivity presented only the facts, the relevance parts, without any commentary or color, and the world was becoming too complex for information alone. Parallel to the rise of radio, interpretive journalism was born to help explain what was happening.
From the Depression through the Cold War, tabloids continued to give way to seriousness in reporting. This trend continued into the 1960s and ‘70s, as the Great Newspaper Wars whittled down the number of papers in each town. The surviving papers were not the tabloids, but the serious papers, and the same was true of television news programs. The news products that people chose in the long term were those that provided them with the more relevant information, rather than entertainment.
During the USA Today era of the 1980s, news was increasingly being produced by companies outside of journalism, and a resurgence of primarily engaging news began. Radio and television had long since replaced newspapers as the dominant news sources, and papers began to add more feature-centered sections. When the industry addressed its readership losses, rather than addressing this substitution of entertainment for content, it focused on cosmetic solutions such as layout, design, and color, thus continuing the decline of relevance in newspapers. To illustrate, a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that news magazines such as Newsweek and Time were seven times more likely in 1997 to share a cover subject with an entertainment magazine like People than they had been in 1977. Whereas in 1977 those covers would have contained a political or international figure 31% of the time and a celebrity or entertainment figure only 15% of the time, in 1997 political figures were down to about 10% of cover stories, and celebrities were up to about 20%.
“Infotainment,” or the new version of tabloidism, is still a prevalent format for today’s news, but as a result “avoidance of local news has doubled in the past ten years,” according to data from Insite Research. The public continues to show a preference for relevant information over entertainment-centered coverage. Another study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, conducted between 1998 and 2000, found that stations that produced higher-quality news programs were more likely to have higher ratings, and even rising ratings, than those that produced lower-quality ones. In this Internet era, also, the web has become a vehicle for up to the minute updates on news and information, providing the public with a venue for relevant and engaging information 24 hours a day, allowing for public and civic journalism to get a foothold among the many other choices the public has to choose from.
Over the decades, the journalism industry has swung like a pendulum between a focus on the entertaining and on the significant sides of the news. Whenever it reaches one extreme or the other, the pendulum begins its swing in the opposite direction. Always, the optimal position for the industry and for the public is somewhere in the middle.
08 June 2006
On Tea & Japan
~Rinzai Zen Priest Eisai (1141-1215)7
Originally brought to
Tea drinking saw a revival during the
The tea seeds Eisai brought back made their way to priest Myoe Shonin, and Uji tea was born. Otherwise known as Gyokuro, or Pearl Dew, the tea grown around Uji was very delicate and sweet. The leaves were rolled and dried, then steamed to brew the tea. Also from the same plant came tencha and matcha teas. Tencha was dried without rolling the leaves. The leaves were them broken and ground into powder for matcha.
Around that time, Shogun Sanetomo Minamoto became ill, asking Eisai for advice. In addition to prayer, Eisai prescribed tea as a remedy. With the Shogun’s recovery, tea’s popularity in
By the early 13th century, “green tea became a staple among cultured people in
A process of roasting tea leaves was introduced to
“Finally through the influence of Zen Buddhist masters, the procedures for serving tea in front of guests were developed in the 14th and 15th century into the spiritually uplifting form in which millions of students practice the Tea Ceremony in different schools today.”1 Chanoyu, or the tea ceremony, evolved, including the rules for tea preparation, serving, consumption, and setting.
The chashitsu, or tea room, also developed. It was a self-contained, one-room world of tea, originally based on the shoin style of living room. The space was at least six to eight tatami mats in size (each woven mat measured approximately 3’ by 6’), and the mats covered the floor entirely. A shoin desk, shelves, and alcove was built into the room, in a style based on the study chambers of Zen priests. Only Chinese utensils were used to prepare tea at this time.
Murata Juko (1422-1502) broke with this style to hold a tea ritual in a humble four and a half tatami mat room, known as the souan style. The mats were arranged in a chase-around type layout, with the half mat at the center. Originally a Zen Buddhist monk, Juko was regarded as the founder of Japanese tea drinking. He said there was no social hierarchy in tea and took the ceremony out of the shoin style study room and into its own freestanding tea hut. With the standardization of the hut’s décor, Juko brought tea from an expensive Chinese style into a definitively Japanese style, choosing simple local elements over fine imported items.4
The son of a wealthy merchant, Sen no Rikyuu (1522-1591), considered the first sage of tea, took Juko’s refinements one step further. Rikyuu’s “background brought him into contact with the tea ceremonies of the rich, but he became more interested in the way priests approached the tea ritual as an embodiment of Zen principles for appreciating the sacred in the everyday. Taking a cue from Juko's example, and seeking to join Zen and tea drinking, Rikyu stripped everything non-essential from the tearoom and the style of preparation, and developed a tea ritual in which there was no wasted movement and no object that was superfluous.”1
Instead of expensive imported utensils and lavish surroundings, Rikyuu made tea in a thatch hut with an iron kettle, bamboo utensils, and a rice bowl for drinking. Most of the implements he designed himself and crafted from bamboo and other simple materials. “The only decoration in a Rikyuu-style tearoom was a hanging scroll or a vase of flowers placed in the alcove. Owing to the very lack of decoration, participants become more aware of details and are awakened to the simple beauty around them and to themselves.”3
Rikyuu’s ideal space consisted of only two tatami mats and could fit no more than two to three people. In addition, Rikyuu pioneered the use of nijiriguchi, or crawling-in doors. A small, low entrance to the tea hut brought every guest to the same level. Reportedly, Rikyuu was intrigued by a small wharf entrance near his home and appropriated the idea for his tea hut.
Rikyuu introduced raku ware to the tea ceremony in the late 16th century. He was said to be inspired by roofing tiles made by Choujiro, and commissioned the artisan to create the spare, rustic, and imperfect simple pottery items. Raku ware was not turned on a pottery wheel but handmade, and roughly, emphasizing a “quiet, simple, and unassuming aesthetic.” This style was in line with the wabi aesthetic. Wabi, literally “desolation,” said that beauty was to be found in things humble and poverty-stricken, or “specifically, it was an appreciation for the imperfect and irregular aspects of nature.” 6
Rikyuu became tea master to Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), considered one of the most significant figures in Japanese history. “Although Rikyū had been one of Hideyoshi's closest confidants, because of crucial differences of opinion and other reasons which remain uncertain, Hideyoshi ordered him to commit ritual suicide.”4
By the end of the 16th century, green tea, and the unpretentious ceremony perfected by Rikyuu, was available to the masses. It became
At the end of the Meiji period, in the late 19th century, the warrior class was abolished, making women the primary practitioners of the tea ceremony. In addition, machine manufacturing began replacing handmade teas. By the 20th century, tea processing had become completely automated, but Japanese green teas are still considered the finest on the market. The roasted teas are not very common, but powdered matcha teas are still used in ceremonial fashion.
Rikyuu’s great-grandsons founded two of the largest tea schools of today, Urasenke and Omotesenke, and the tea ceremony is now being taught worldwide to both men and women.7
~Sen Soshitsu, Ura Senke Grand Tea Master6
Works Cited
2. "Green Tea." Japanese Food 101. 20 Jan. 2006. 20 May 2006
3. "History of the Tea Ceremony and Wabi-Cha."
4. "Japanese Design, Culture in the Age of Civil Wars." Sengoku Expo. 25 May 2006
5. "Japanese Tea Ceremony." Wikipedia. 18 May 2006
6. Neighbour Parent, Mary, comp. JAANUS - Teminology of Japanese Architecture and Art History. 2003. 25 May 2006
7. "Tea History." Green Tea Lovers. 15 May 2006
15 May 2006
Take Back the Night
It was chilly and gray at 6:00p.m. that Thursday. One hundred, maybe 200 people were gathered at the bottom of the Aztec Center Free Speech Steps on April 27. They were mostly students and the vast majority were women.
Clumps of women in sorority sweatshirts dotted the crowd, as did an equal number of women in purple T-shirts that read “Let’s Talk About Sex,” and “Break the Silence, Stop the Violence.” Two uniformed campus police officers stood by their truck at the base of the steps, watching the proceedings.
A podium at the top of the stairs stood like a pulpit in front of the speaker, and the crowd listened in respectful silence until it was appropriate to laugh or cheer. A large blank projection screen was set up behind her, but the wind knocked it over mid-sentence.
“I guess that’s intermission,” she said. “That’s good, because I was starting to get a little choked up.”
The crowd laughed a little, and Tracy Johnson from the San Diego Rape Crisis Center went on speaking.
“Aren’t you all here to raise awareness? Aren’t you all here to show other students, your faculty, administration, and public safety group that you’re serious about sexual violence on campus, and you want them to be too?” shouted Johnson, and the crowd cheered. “Let’s increase community awareness… and help change the culture of sexual violence!”
It was the annual Take Back the Night rally at San Diego State University.
“Take Back the Night has been going on for 28 years in the US,” Johnson said into the microphone, competing with the wind again. “Let’s put that into perspective: that’s almost three decades of Take Back the Night.
“On the one hand, I want to celebrate – and I do celebrate each and every one of you for taking the time to care and wanting to put an end to this silent epidemic. On the other hand I’m distressed, as you can imagine – 28 years of Take Back the Nights and they still have to exist?”
According to Johnson, one in three women has been or will be assaulted in her lifetime. One in twelve men will share the same fate.
“The American Medical Association has declared sexual assault an epidemic in our society,” she said. “This is more than Take Back the Night tonight. This is Take Back Our Rights – our right to walk home…, our right to run in the evening after a long day of classes, our right to go to the bar for a drink, or for many drinks, and not fear that someone will hurt us, or violate us, and the right to go out… and be safe!”
Johnson stepped down from the podium and the women staffing the even passed out glow sticks, picket signs, and chant sheets printed on squares of pink paper. The march portion of the evening had begun, and the crowd flowed between the columns of Aztec Center and over the footbridge. Their path took them between the residence halls, down Montezuma Ave., and up Campanile Rd. where the throng held up traffic for a good five minutes.
“Our bodies, our minds, our right to decide!” yelled the marchers, along with some other more colorful slogans.
Car horns honked as they chanted their way down either side of Fraternity Row before heading back toward Love Library. The officers drove behind the marchers to discourage onlookers from causing trouble.
One resident on Hardy Ave., Jake Kobernick, was standing outside his house watching the procession.
“What they’re saying obviously I agree with,” he said. “I think everyone does. I don’t know what protesting is going to do down these streets though. It is nice to see that they’re standing up and that they’re doing something. For sure, it’ll raise awareness. I’m sure there are people down these streets who don’t even think about [violence against women]”
Once back at the Free Speech Steps, white candles were distributed and lit, although it wasn’t quite dark yet. The flames sputtered and dipped against the weather but most kept from going out. Poet and performer Kimberly Dark, the other featured speaker of the night, stepped up to the podium. A PowerPoint presentation displaying various facts about sexual violence churned on the big screen behind her.
“First of all, I need to liberate myself from this podium!” she said as she pulled the microphone from its stand. A few of the women cheered. She recited a poem about discovering the broken and bloody victim of incest in a public bathroom one night after work. The crowd didn’t make any sound over the noise of the wind and Dark’s words hung heavy for a moment.
“Thought becomes word becomes deed becomes habit becomes culture,” she said. “So what you all have done here this evening in marching and getting together is you have turned stories into action. And that is a very powerful thing.”
It was time for testimonials. A few dozen of the remaining crowd, maybe a third its original size, approached the microphone, and, one by one, they shared their own quiet tragedies of sexual violence and abuse. Hugs and tears flowed freely, and the evening began to draw to a close.
“As you leave tonight remember the reality is that most of the violence against women is not perpetrated in public places,” Johnson had said earlier in the night. “Most of the violence against women happens in our own homes, in our personal relationships.”
Take Back the Night has been hosted by the Women’s Resource Center at SDSU every spring for the last several years, but this year’s rally was different. It was a protest against sexual violence just like in past years, but this time the WRC was joined by the SDSU chapter of the National Organization for Women, several Sorority houses, and Fraternity Men Against Negative Environments and Rape Situations, or ‘Frat Manners’.
“If we work together we’ll be even stronger,” said Christina Gonzalez, co-president of the campus chapter of NOW. NOW has been a supporting organization behind Take Back the Night, which is hosted by the WRC, for three years, but just this year the two organizations began coordinating their efforts to create Sexual Assault Awareness Month, which ran from April 10-27. T-shirts that read “I ♥ Consensual Sex” were sold, and then back-ordered. The second annual Love Your Body Festival was held on April 14.
“I think it’s great,” said Manny Konedeng of Frat Manners, who also spoke briefly before the march. “It’s a great turnout.”
Frat Manners has been on campus for over three years, and they got involved with Take Back the Night after some fraternity men were caught throwing things at the marchers one year, said Konedeng. The men of Frat Manners decided to get involved and take action.
“Sexual assault prevention starts with a sense of responsibility for your actions,” Konedeng said, “and it begins with respect for women.”
The same incident with the fraternities was cited as a reason for the campus police’s presence as well. Lea Dennis, an alumnus who participated in the march several years ago, said there were also problems with men following women into the restrooms during the event, but campus police could not confirm or deny the report.
Officer Ruben Luna, on duty during the march, said that though he was relatively new to the force, he had heard about fraternity men exposing themselves to the marchers and throwing eggs. Overall, though, he said Take Back the Night was a very positive event.
Corporal Josh Mays patrolled the rally last year, one of two officers assigned to the march, and though he cited the reason for police presence as a request by event organizers, he too saw the rally as a positive measure on campus.
“As with any type of issue or event,” said Mays, “you raise awareness and awareness is power. When you have an event with media and police presence people are going to take notice. In that sense I think it was a successful event.”
The number of sexual assaults on campus since the introduction of Take Back the Night has fluctuated some, but Mays could not confirm any direct correlation between the event and the crime rates – there are simply too many factors to consider, he said. More detailed information on campus crime rates and bulletins is available at www.dps.sdsu.edu.
“Take Back the Night and RAD (the Rape Aggression Defense program offered to women on campus) are the most prominent programs on campus,” said Mays.
And while the number of assaults dropped significantly between 2004 and 2005, there was an increase in forcible sexual assaults this year, from 11 to 16, but Mays said the participants in these programs were not likely the victims. Even so, the majority of attacks on campus were perpetrated by acquaintances. According to Mays, only three of the attacks listed in the department’s statistics from recent years were stranger rapes.
Just how prominent are these campus programs for women’s safety, though? While there was a significant turnout of sorority members at Take Back the Night, not one of the women interviewed from Alpha Phi or Sigma Alpha Zeta had ever heard of the event before the Pan-Hellenic Council made the announcement this year and encouraged them to attend. Even Kobernick, who lives along the route that the march has taken for the last several years, had never heard of the event until it strolled through his front yard.
Unlike in previous years, the march wasn’t listed in the campus e-Newsletter. NOW and the WRC manned a table in the Aztec Center, selling T-shirts and passing out purple fliers all that week, but there was no big announcement on campus to let the approximately 40 thousand students know about it.
Associated Students President Chris Manigault spoke during the rally, with ideas to make sexual assault an even more prominent issue on campus.
“Let’s march during orientation,” he said. Incoming freshman especially need to be made aware, said Manigault.
“These are things people think about but never say,” said event participant Jennifer Cesena. “We need to be out here more than once a year.”
Clumps of women in sorority sweatshirts dotted the crowd, as did an equal number of women in purple T-shirts that read “Let’s Talk About Sex,” and “Break the Silence, Stop the Violence.” Two uniformed campus police officers stood by their truck at the base of the steps, watching the proceedings.
A podium at the top of the stairs stood like a pulpit in front of the speaker, and the crowd listened in respectful silence until it was appropriate to laugh or cheer. A large blank projection screen was set up behind her, but the wind knocked it over mid-sentence.
“I guess that’s intermission,” she said. “That’s good, because I was starting to get a little choked up.”
The crowd laughed a little, and Tracy Johnson from the San Diego Rape Crisis Center went on speaking.
“Aren’t you all here to raise awareness? Aren’t you all here to show other students, your faculty, administration, and public safety group that you’re serious about sexual violence on campus, and you want them to be too?” shouted Johnson, and the crowd cheered. “Let’s increase community awareness… and help change the culture of sexual violence!”
It was the annual Take Back the Night rally at San Diego State University.
“Take Back the Night has been going on for 28 years in the US,” Johnson said into the microphone, competing with the wind again. “Let’s put that into perspective: that’s almost three decades of Take Back the Night.
“On the one hand, I want to celebrate – and I do celebrate each and every one of you for taking the time to care and wanting to put an end to this silent epidemic. On the other hand I’m distressed, as you can imagine – 28 years of Take Back the Nights and they still have to exist?”
According to Johnson, one in three women has been or will be assaulted in her lifetime. One in twelve men will share the same fate.
“The American Medical Association has declared sexual assault an epidemic in our society,” she said. “This is more than Take Back the Night tonight. This is Take Back Our Rights – our right to walk home…, our right to run in the evening after a long day of classes, our right to go to the bar for a drink, or for many drinks, and not fear that someone will hurt us, or violate us, and the right to go out… and be safe!”
Johnson stepped down from the podium and the women staffing the even passed out glow sticks, picket signs, and chant sheets printed on squares of pink paper. The march portion of the evening had begun, and the crowd flowed between the columns of Aztec Center and over the footbridge. Their path took them between the residence halls, down Montezuma Ave., and up Campanile Rd. where the throng held up traffic for a good five minutes.
“Our bodies, our minds, our right to decide!” yelled the marchers, along with some other more colorful slogans.
Car horns honked as they chanted their way down either side of Fraternity Row before heading back toward Love Library. The officers drove behind the marchers to discourage onlookers from causing trouble.
One resident on Hardy Ave., Jake Kobernick, was standing outside his house watching the procession.
“What they’re saying obviously I agree with,” he said. “I think everyone does. I don’t know what protesting is going to do down these streets though. It is nice to see that they’re standing up and that they’re doing something. For sure, it’ll raise awareness. I’m sure there are people down these streets who don’t even think about [violence against women]”
Once back at the Free Speech Steps, white candles were distributed and lit, although it wasn’t quite dark yet. The flames sputtered and dipped against the weather but most kept from going out. Poet and performer Kimberly Dark, the other featured speaker of the night, stepped up to the podium. A PowerPoint presentation displaying various facts about sexual violence churned on the big screen behind her.
“First of all, I need to liberate myself from this podium!” she said as she pulled the microphone from its stand. A few of the women cheered. She recited a poem about discovering the broken and bloody victim of incest in a public bathroom one night after work. The crowd didn’t make any sound over the noise of the wind and Dark’s words hung heavy for a moment.
“Thought becomes word becomes deed becomes habit becomes culture,” she said. “So what you all have done here this evening in marching and getting together is you have turned stories into action. And that is a very powerful thing.”
It was time for testimonials. A few dozen of the remaining crowd, maybe a third its original size, approached the microphone, and, one by one, they shared their own quiet tragedies of sexual violence and abuse. Hugs and tears flowed freely, and the evening began to draw to a close.
“As you leave tonight remember the reality is that most of the violence against women is not perpetrated in public places,” Johnson had said earlier in the night. “Most of the violence against women happens in our own homes, in our personal relationships.”
Take Back the Night has been hosted by the Women’s Resource Center at SDSU every spring for the last several years, but this year’s rally was different. It was a protest against sexual violence just like in past years, but this time the WRC was joined by the SDSU chapter of the National Organization for Women, several Sorority houses, and Fraternity Men Against Negative Environments and Rape Situations, or ‘Frat Manners’.
“If we work together we’ll be even stronger,” said Christina Gonzalez, co-president of the campus chapter of NOW. NOW has been a supporting organization behind Take Back the Night, which is hosted by the WRC, for three years, but just this year the two organizations began coordinating their efforts to create Sexual Assault Awareness Month, which ran from April 10-27. T-shirts that read “I ♥ Consensual Sex” were sold, and then back-ordered. The second annual Love Your Body Festival was held on April 14.
“I think it’s great,” said Manny Konedeng of Frat Manners, who also spoke briefly before the march. “It’s a great turnout.”
Frat Manners has been on campus for over three years, and they got involved with Take Back the Night after some fraternity men were caught throwing things at the marchers one year, said Konedeng. The men of Frat Manners decided to get involved and take action.
“Sexual assault prevention starts with a sense of responsibility for your actions,” Konedeng said, “and it begins with respect for women.”
The same incident with the fraternities was cited as a reason for the campus police’s presence as well. Lea Dennis, an alumnus who participated in the march several years ago, said there were also problems with men following women into the restrooms during the event, but campus police could not confirm or deny the report.
Officer Ruben Luna, on duty during the march, said that though he was relatively new to the force, he had heard about fraternity men exposing themselves to the marchers and throwing eggs. Overall, though, he said Take Back the Night was a very positive event.
Corporal Josh Mays patrolled the rally last year, one of two officers assigned to the march, and though he cited the reason for police presence as a request by event organizers, he too saw the rally as a positive measure on campus.
“As with any type of issue or event,” said Mays, “you raise awareness and awareness is power. When you have an event with media and police presence people are going to take notice. In that sense I think it was a successful event.”
The number of sexual assaults on campus since the introduction of Take Back the Night has fluctuated some, but Mays could not confirm any direct correlation between the event and the crime rates – there are simply too many factors to consider, he said. More detailed information on campus crime rates and bulletins is available at www.dps.sdsu.edu.
“Take Back the Night and RAD (the Rape Aggression Defense program offered to women on campus) are the most prominent programs on campus,” said Mays.
And while the number of assaults dropped significantly between 2004 and 2005, there was an increase in forcible sexual assaults this year, from 11 to 16, but Mays said the participants in these programs were not likely the victims. Even so, the majority of attacks on campus were perpetrated by acquaintances. According to Mays, only three of the attacks listed in the department’s statistics from recent years were stranger rapes.
Just how prominent are these campus programs for women’s safety, though? While there was a significant turnout of sorority members at Take Back the Night, not one of the women interviewed from Alpha Phi or Sigma Alpha Zeta had ever heard of the event before the Pan-Hellenic Council made the announcement this year and encouraged them to attend. Even Kobernick, who lives along the route that the march has taken for the last several years, had never heard of the event until it strolled through his front yard.
Unlike in previous years, the march wasn’t listed in the campus e-Newsletter. NOW and the WRC manned a table in the Aztec Center, selling T-shirts and passing out purple fliers all that week, but there was no big announcement on campus to let the approximately 40 thousand students know about it.
Associated Students President Chris Manigault spoke during the rally, with ideas to make sexual assault an even more prominent issue on campus.
“Let’s march during orientation,” he said. Incoming freshman especially need to be made aware, said Manigault.
“These are things people think about but never say,” said event participant Jennifer Cesena. “We need to be out here more than once a year.”
17 April 2006
Observations
The walls are a splotchy yellow. They feel unfinished, hastily painted maybe, but inviting in a way. They host a patchwork of paintings. Some rest in heavy, ornate gold frames; some have naked canvas edges. It is a roughly even mix of skillfully and amateurishly executed art, not one likely designed to be hung adjacent to its neighbor. Seemingly random pillars and doorframes dissect the space, a skeletal version of the quaint Craftsman house it may have once been.
In the front room is a large counter with a cash register and a whirring espresso machine at one end and a glass display of decadent desserts at the other. Next to the register sits a glass vase, half full of crumpled bills. A handwritten index card taped to the vase says “401K.” In the opposite corner sits a squat table with a built in screen, a rather dated Pac-Man console.
A hodgepodge of armchairs and couches, and wooden tables with mismatched wooden chairs is unevenly distributed throughout the shop, atop oriental rugs and hardwood floors. Most of the seats are taken tonight. In any direction, half a dozen laptop computers can be seen, open and glowing amidst a clutter of large hardbound books, binders, papers, plates of half-eaten food, and mugs likely full of caffeinated liquids.
One laptop is open but doesn’t appear to be turned on. Two men and a woman are seated around the old table. One of the men talks animatedly about his latest idea. He’s thinks they should use a Norplant-like system to deliver Ritalin to school children, he says. His red tennis shoes match his backpack. The woman scribbles absently on the open newspaper in front of her. The men go back to their reading and the computer screen remains dark.
A ceiling fan turns steadily overhead, creating a strobe effect as each blade passes under the light fixture in the ceiling. There is a steady whine from the espresso machine in the distance.
A group of six or seven women have pulled chairs from some of the tables and congregated in a circle at the back of the shop. They are intent in their discussion and don’t seem to notice their surroundings. One woman in a pink and black striped shirt is doing most of the talking, occasionally wrinkling her forehead intently. She and her companions are significantly older than the rest of the shop’s patrons.
Across the room two women sit by themselves at a table that could probably hold six. Both have computers in front of them, but only one is paying attention to hers, the screen reflected dully in her glasses. The other woman talks on her cellular phone, her eyelashes fluttering every time she speaks. She stares at the ceiling while the other party buzzes in her ear.
A man with his baseball cap turned backwards stares at the wall instead of at his open notebook. He sighs and adjusts his glasses on his nose, absently turning a page as though he had read it. He begins fiddling with a stray lock of his dark hair that’s stuck out from under his cap. A heavily worn paperback book rests on his small table – the spine says Organic Chemistry. The book is turned toward the other chair, currently occupied by a rumpled backpack.
One table seems shoved into a corner of the back room. A woman in a striped red headscarf sits facing the room, using her lap instead of the table as a writing surface. She seems hunched, huddled there under the yellow light of the table lamp, her bare feet up on the adjacent armchair. She blows her nose noisily and resumes her work.
The man with the red shoes discusses polygamy and the Church of Latter Day Saints with the other man at the table. The woman twirls her platinum blonde hair absently. Not long after the two of them leave and the other man is left alone at the big table. He fidgets and tries to concentrate, repeatedly taking a highlighter to the pages in front of him.
A large, five-paneled bay window reveals the patio outside, and the busy street beyond. White orbs of light seem to float on the bushes, their lampposts hidden by overgrowth. A marquee for the mortuary across the way glows obscenely in the darkness. Near the window is a large painting, an abstract mess of color that seems an attempt at impressionism. Beneath the painting sit two women, their books spread out on the table in front of them. They talk intently with one another and the books are forgotten. One woman absently holds a pen in one hand, but it is nowhere near her paper.
Loud voices erupt over the dull murmur of the shop, growing to a cackle and subsiding just as quickly. The circle of women have finished their discussion and turned to gossip.
A man in a leather jacket walks into the back section of the shop, scanning the room for an empty seat. He sees the woman in the headscarf and walks toward her. She looks up and smiles. He sits across from her and they begin speaking in another language.
In the wide door frame that opens to the center section, another man sits with his computer. He carefully lifts the teabag from his cup, squeezes it, and sets it in a waiting smaller cup. He laces his fingers behind his head and stretches briefly before returning his attention to the screen.
The man with the backwards hat brings his backpack from the chair to the floor next to him and begins to rifle through it. He pulls several small objects from the pack and drops them into a waiting plastic cup. He sighs again and begins flipping through his book, again twirling the lock of hair on his forehead.
A woman in the middle section of the shop begins to pack up her belongings. Two newcomers circle her table like vultures over a carcass. She busses her own dishes and leaves, several bags in tow.
The man in the leather jacket moves to the table where the man with the highlighter sits, but he talks across the room to the woman in the headscarf in their strange, rapid-fire tongue. She takes a sip of a drink the same color as her scarf and looks down at her books.
In the front room is a large counter with a cash register and a whirring espresso machine at one end and a glass display of decadent desserts at the other. Next to the register sits a glass vase, half full of crumpled bills. A handwritten index card taped to the vase says “401K.” In the opposite corner sits a squat table with a built in screen, a rather dated Pac-Man console.
A hodgepodge of armchairs and couches, and wooden tables with mismatched wooden chairs is unevenly distributed throughout the shop, atop oriental rugs and hardwood floors. Most of the seats are taken tonight. In any direction, half a dozen laptop computers can be seen, open and glowing amidst a clutter of large hardbound books, binders, papers, plates of half-eaten food, and mugs likely full of caffeinated liquids.
One laptop is open but doesn’t appear to be turned on. Two men and a woman are seated around the old table. One of the men talks animatedly about his latest idea. He’s thinks they should use a Norplant-like system to deliver Ritalin to school children, he says. His red tennis shoes match his backpack. The woman scribbles absently on the open newspaper in front of her. The men go back to their reading and the computer screen remains dark.
A ceiling fan turns steadily overhead, creating a strobe effect as each blade passes under the light fixture in the ceiling. There is a steady whine from the espresso machine in the distance.
A group of six or seven women have pulled chairs from some of the tables and congregated in a circle at the back of the shop. They are intent in their discussion and don’t seem to notice their surroundings. One woman in a pink and black striped shirt is doing most of the talking, occasionally wrinkling her forehead intently. She and her companions are significantly older than the rest of the shop’s patrons.
Across the room two women sit by themselves at a table that could probably hold six. Both have computers in front of them, but only one is paying attention to hers, the screen reflected dully in her glasses. The other woman talks on her cellular phone, her eyelashes fluttering every time she speaks. She stares at the ceiling while the other party buzzes in her ear.
A man with his baseball cap turned backwards stares at the wall instead of at his open notebook. He sighs and adjusts his glasses on his nose, absently turning a page as though he had read it. He begins fiddling with a stray lock of his dark hair that’s stuck out from under his cap. A heavily worn paperback book rests on his small table – the spine says Organic Chemistry. The book is turned toward the other chair, currently occupied by a rumpled backpack.
One table seems shoved into a corner of the back room. A woman in a striped red headscarf sits facing the room, using her lap instead of the table as a writing surface. She seems hunched, huddled there under the yellow light of the table lamp, her bare feet up on the adjacent armchair. She blows her nose noisily and resumes her work.
The man with the red shoes discusses polygamy and the Church of Latter Day Saints with the other man at the table. The woman twirls her platinum blonde hair absently. Not long after the two of them leave and the other man is left alone at the big table. He fidgets and tries to concentrate, repeatedly taking a highlighter to the pages in front of him.
A large, five-paneled bay window reveals the patio outside, and the busy street beyond. White orbs of light seem to float on the bushes, their lampposts hidden by overgrowth. A marquee for the mortuary across the way glows obscenely in the darkness. Near the window is a large painting, an abstract mess of color that seems an attempt at impressionism. Beneath the painting sit two women, their books spread out on the table in front of them. They talk intently with one another and the books are forgotten. One woman absently holds a pen in one hand, but it is nowhere near her paper.
Loud voices erupt over the dull murmur of the shop, growing to a cackle and subsiding just as quickly. The circle of women have finished their discussion and turned to gossip.
A man in a leather jacket walks into the back section of the shop, scanning the room for an empty seat. He sees the woman in the headscarf and walks toward her. She looks up and smiles. He sits across from her and they begin speaking in another language.
In the wide door frame that opens to the center section, another man sits with his computer. He carefully lifts the teabag from his cup, squeezes it, and sets it in a waiting smaller cup. He laces his fingers behind his head and stretches briefly before returning his attention to the screen.
The man with the backwards hat brings his backpack from the chair to the floor next to him and begins to rifle through it. He pulls several small objects from the pack and drops them into a waiting plastic cup. He sighs again and begins flipping through his book, again twirling the lock of hair on his forehead.
A woman in the middle section of the shop begins to pack up her belongings. Two newcomers circle her table like vultures over a carcass. She busses her own dishes and leaves, several bags in tow.
The man in the leather jacket moves to the table where the man with the highlighter sits, but he talks across the room to the woman in the headscarf in their strange, rapid-fire tongue. She takes a sip of a drink the same color as her scarf and looks down at her books.
27 March 2006
If Only LA Had a Soul, by Craig Svonkin
I found this while browsing the online version of CRATE journal (www.crate.ucr.edu/home.html) and decided it was worthy of sharing. Craig, thank you for reminding me how much I treasure language.
Paris has any number of them. From the Cathedral of Notre Dame to Saint Chapelle, from the Louvre to the Luxembourg Gardens, the problem in Paris is finding spaces lacking wonder, spaces that cry out "I am common." Likewise, New York has the observation deck of the Empire State Building, the ice skating rink at Rockefeller Center, Grand Central Station, Central Park, and perhaps one day soon the Ground Zero Memorial at Daniel Libeskind's new World Trade Center. Jerusalem has the Old City, with its Western Wall for Jews, Church of the Holy Sepulchre for Christians, and Dome of the Rock for Muslims. San Francisco, our Paris to the north, has many sites of wonder and sublimity, but what about Los Angeles? Where is L.A.'s Golden Gate Bridge, barely visible above a fog bank? Where is our Coit Tower or City Lights Bookstore? Where are our sacred spaces? Does Los Angeles have a soul?
The rap against LA., endlessly replayed in story, song and film from Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust to Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard to Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One to the Eagle's "Hotel California" to Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle," is that L.A. is a soulless vampire ever ready to devour another starry-eyed, fresh-faced ingenue. L.A. is commonly depicted as circus or cemetery, carnival or simulacrum, as always self-ironizing but never souled. The metanarrative of Los Angeles seems fairly consistent--a chimeric patina of fairy faux-Land just barely hiding the bleak reality of noir-Land beneath its surface. And while there are plenty of simulated, macabre sites of hopelessness and despair in the Southland, as any lucky visitor to the jaw-dropping Forest Lawn Cemetery and Theme Park in Glendale already knows, L.A. is also more of a spiritual place than the sum of its movie-engendered cliches would have us believe. Of course, I am biased, having grown up wandering the used bookstores of Hollywood, visiting the revival movie theaters scattered across town, and urban exploring the back alleys of downtown L.A. Reading lists can be stultifying, but for the novice here are some of my favorite spaces of wonder, joy, or the sacred with which to begin an investigation into spiritual Los Angeles: the Bradbury Building, the Movie Palaces of Broadway, Huntington Gardens on a rainy day, the Chinese Theater for a matinee, Ferndale, Union Station, the view of all of Los Angeles from the Getty Center on a clear afternoon, the Japanese Pavilion at LACMA, Frank Gehry's Disney Hall, the Watts Towers, and a double bill at the Silent Movie Theatre followed by a late night bowl of matzah-ball soup at Canter's Deli. But for me, one place outshines all of these other potential contenders for the title of L.A.'s spiritual center: David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology (MOJT).
The MOJT, created and curated by David Wilson, is, at 9341 Venice Boulevard, a jewel hidden behind a nondescript storefront in a culturally hybridized section of Culver City, surrounded to the west by an Indian Sweets and Spices (great for delicious and cheap vegetarian lunches) and to the east by a Thai Restaurant (good for a Thai iced coffee break) and an ever-crowded In-N-Out Burger, with the cool neighborhood bar "Carbon" across the street. This meta-museum is something of a tribute to the museums of our youth, as well as to those Ur-museums, the Wunderkammern or Cabinets of Curiosities, which predated the Cartesian scientific museums of the Modern era.
The Wunderkammern, as Barbara Maria Stafford explains, were "Encyclopedic collections of fantastic and useful objects--minerals, shells, bizarre animal specimens, marvels of human art and science, clever machines, amazing toys--assembled in overflowing rooms [...] and teeming cabinets [... , and] constituted a luxurious diversion for the European elite of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries"(6). Yet while the Wunderkammern were the predecessors to the Modern scientific and natural history museums, they were also decidedly anti-Cartesian and anti-Enlightenment spaces. As Descartes himself made clear, the Cabinets of Curiosity were threats to rationality, for they brought about astonishment, and "[w]hat we commonly call being astonished [...] is an excess of wonder which can never be otherwise than bad"(qtd. in Weschler 89). As Lawrence Weschler, author of the preeminent book on Wilson's MOJT, points out, this sense of wonder associated with the Wunderkammern thus "afforded a steady undertow to any simple, straightforward advances in positivist certainty"(89). In one of the thematically central exhibits of the MOJT, Wilson emphasizes the threat that the MOJT, as a modern reincarnation of the Wunderkammern, presents to scientific, rational thought. In a case reading "Out of order," an unidentified scientific apparatus hovers over a turntable with five glass dishes, each heaping with a colored powder. The dishes are captioned "POSSESSION," "DELUSION," "PARANOIA," "SCHIZOPHRENIA," and "REASON," but the apparatus has shattered the dish marked "REASON," leaving behind a scatter of glass shards and powder.
Entering the MOJT, it takes time to adjust to the darkness and hushed, strange sounds of the museum, but once one's eyes adjust to the distinctly dim light, the motto of the museum clearly situates it in the stream of the Wunderkammern: "The learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar; guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life." But if that were not enough, the strangeness, diversity, and sheer eclecticism of the collection of exhibits hidden throughout the darkened, moody, labyrinthine museum is enough to convince me that the MOJT is a tribute to the half-remembered and half-created dream museums of our childhood, spaces more about the experience of transcendence and wonder than objective scientific inquiry or enlightenment.
On display in the MOJT is an amazing variety of items bridging the aesthetic gap from the absurd to the uncanny, from the macabre to the wonderful, a range of exhibits truly fitting for a city of Los Angeles' amazing variety: a model of Noah's Ark mounted on two moving pistons (the Ark being the world's first museum of natural history); an exhibit entitled "Garden of Eden on Wheels," including beautiful models of Los Angeles area mobile homes and trailer parks; a group of horns and antlers, with a horn possibly taken from the head of Mary Davis of Saughall; a fruitstone carving, supposedly depicting an intricate miniature landscape invisible to the naked eye; microminiature sculptures on the heads of needles created by one Hagop Sandaldjian; magician Ricky Jay's collection of decaying dice; an exhibit of beautiful vitrines depicting folk remedies entitled "Tell the Bees . . . Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition"; a jewel-like theatre and Russian tea room, serving tea from a samovar along with tea cookies; and so on.
One of the key exhibits of the MOJT, and one of my favorites, depicts the lifecycle of the Cameroonian Stink Ant (Megaloponera foetens), which on occasion is infected by inhaling a microscopic spore from a fungus. It is subsequently driven by the growth of the fungus to climb to the top of the rain forest, grip its plant, and then die. The fungus breaks through the ant's head, in a horn-like spike, eventually raining down spores on other unsuspecting ants, which, infected, repeat the cycle. When asked about the stink ant, Wilson pointed out that the exhibit could be read in two ways--as imparting pure information, and as metaphor. After all, one of the mottoes of the museum is "Ut Translatio Natura"--Nature as Metaphor. As Wilson explains, "[T]here've been times in my own life when I felt exactly like that ant--impelled, as if possessed, to do things that defy all common sense"(qtd. in Weschler 63). And if Wilson, like the Cameroonian Stink Ant, was impelled by some mysterious fungus to give up his life to build his improbable museum, perhaps he hopes that his museum can likewise infect us, his visitors, impelling us to pursue our own personal quixotic quests.
Like Wilson, I too was infected by some strange spore during my childhood trips to museums, those secular cathedrals of my youth. I can relate to his love of museums, which perhaps accounts for the waves of love and awe I felt during my first visit to the MOJT. Just as I loved my childhood trips to the Natural History Museum more for the mystery of those darkened, labyrinthine rooms than for any sense that I was gaining knowledge, entering the moody light of the MOJT recreated the sacred feelings I felt in those childhood museums, or that I felt when I entered the dim stained-glass light of Notre Dame or St. Chapelle. Entering the MOJT felt like a psychic return to the womb, working on me like a magical Proustian madeleine cookie, returning me to my earliest childhood memories of trips to the museums, used book stores, gem shops, movie theatres, and antique shops of L.A.
It seems no coincidence, then, that Proust's madeleine cookies are on display at the MOJT. Next to an exhibit documenting Geoffrey Sonnabend's arcane theory of memory and forgetting is a small exhibit of madeleine cookies that can be smelled through a tube, alongside text from Proust's famous novel, Remembrance of Things Past, that novel of memories spurred by the accidental recreation of a childhood sensory experience, the eating of a madeleine soaked in tea. And so, just as that cookie brought back memories for Proust's alter-ego, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, with its moody lighting, with its strange hushed sounds and musty smells, brought back spiritual memories of childhood for me, and perhaps for many others. In this sense, the MOJT is something like L.A.'s tribute to memory while simultaneously being our central memento mori, or reminder of death and forgetting. It is thus a fitting tribute to L.A., the land that both collects the past (what is L.A., if not a freakish collection of past styles, fads, and rituals) and constantly attempts to forget or erase it.
Walter Benjamin, in "Unpacking My Library," argues that collecting is not essentially about organized, logical thought, but rather is an emotional, irrational attempt to ward off the loss of forgetting, the loss of death: "Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories"(60). Like Benjamin's collector, David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology is a chaotic place that seems to develop its own alternative logic and order upon return visits. This is perhaps because it is a pre-Enlightenment space. Like Los Angeles itself, it has not been designed in a logical manner, but rather has grown in an organic and random way. This is as it should be. On my last visit to the museum, I entered a room I had entered a dozen times before, when suddenly I realized that there was a new doorway. Imagine my sense of wonder and joy as I entered that doorway, only to find two beautiful new exhibits, made all the more wonderful because I just happened onto them. This is a microcosm of my experience of Los Angeles, a space that is always changing and, for the openhearted wanderer, a place that is always off ering the gift of surprise.
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