Fotos

At the Getty ( all text from the Getty's website)
In Focus: The Nude
The unclothed human figure became a camera subject shortly after the discovery of photography was announced in 1839. This exhibition, which is drawn exclusively from the Getty Museum's collection of photographs, brings together the work of over 25 innovative photographers who have left their mark on the history of the genre.



André Kertész Photographs: Seven Decades
This exhibition shows the quality and diversity of a very long career in photography. It comprises approximately 55 prints drawn from the collection of the Getty Museum. The exhibition follows a chronological and geographic path, beginning in Hungary, where Kertész was born in 1894 and made his first photograph in 1912, then moving to rare small prints made in Paris, where he emigrated in 1925. The final section presents photographs made in New York, where he lived and worked from 1936 until his death in 1985 at the age of 91.



The Goat's Dance: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide
The work of Mexico City photographer Graciela Iturbide (b. 1942) is featured in a show of more than 100 prints drawn from a combination of sources. Not strictly a retrospective of the photographer's career, this exhibition highlights Iturbide's work with surviving indigenous communities in southern Mexico (such as the Zapotec Indians of Juchitán and the Mixtec Indians of Huajuapan), outsider immigrant groups in East Los Angeles (like members of the White Fence and Maravilla gangs), and those struggling at La Frontera, the U.S./Mexico border. Concentrating on this international artist's North American pictures, it examines her more recent landscape studies from the American South as well as Mexico, and presents images from Iturbide's native city created almost 40 years.

Adonis García

Las aventuras, desaventuras y sueños de Adonis García, el vampiro de la colonia Roma de Luis Zapata


Adonis García is, thus far, the only male protagonic prostitute of my study. The author puts the story in the mouth of his creation and demands double duty of his readers. As reader, I experience Adonis' narrative via two senses - sight, of course, but hearing as well. It is a twist on the "found manuscript" device and Zapata invokes Lazarillo to great effect. I paraphrase and translate (if one can do both) a bit from the back cover, the hypothetic presence of a tape recorder to serve as the vehicle of an uninterrupted monologue, through which parade moments of a picaresque life in the unknown underbelly of Mexico City. Premature adolescence, homosexuality, prostitution, illness, tedium are the organizing themes that Adonis chooses to relate the stages of his life. Zapata indeed seems to revitalize the picaresque novel, while at the same time extract constants from that genre and reinterpret them in a great American metropolis of the XXth century. The whole novel is an homage to the picaresque novel and is sprinkled with quotes from not just Lazarillo, but also El buscón, El Periquillo Sarniento. This novel is also, thus far, the first to establish, if only intertextually, the "transatlantic" link I've been looking for in the narrative - it is more obvious in film.

cinta primera y tú ¿qué vas a hacer cuan
do dios se muera?

Dios no se muere; parientes tiene (Perico) y padrinos que lo
socorran; ricos hay en México harto piadosos que lo protejan...
JOSÉ JOAQUÍN FERNÁNDEZ DE LIZARDI. El Periquillo Sarniento

( llegábamos a una fiesta un cuate y yo

____________________________________________

Menudo Christmas Day entry, ¿qué no?

Cellebration of the senses

Just sent e-mail to friends and family letting them know that my old phone number is back in commission. It's funny how much I've missed it. I think I was a fairly late adopter of cell phone technology and even used to self-righteously make disparaging comments about those who seemed surgically fused to their phones. That was until the accidental presence of K.'s phone in my truck made it easier to arrange logistics on the hardest day of my life. When I got my own phone, I also got that number. Now I am thinking that some commentator on pop culture or psychology or (post-)modernity or technology should do an article on how a phone number can quite unconsciously/subconsciously become a bit of an extension of personality. Someone probably has. Though I open myself to being mocked, I admit to feeling that my phone number (especially the cell phone number) is, whether I like it or not, part of who I am. Maybe that's because it works for me in reverse. Rather, seeing the phone numbers of others (especially on the cell phone screen) brings those people to mind and evokes whatever memory or emotion I associate with them. Perhaps this is why I've always kind of enjoyed entering numbers by hand every two years when the plan expires and we get new phones. Not that I could have had them electronically transfered this time even if I'd wanted to, and it would have been tempting, as entering the 55 numbers I either had memorized or written down caused my thumbs to cramp (those who grew up playing video games have no idea what that would even feel like). Yesterday K., seeing what I was doing, asked, "When you put in a number, you picture that person, don't you?" Indeed, I did. And I heard, felt (and in the case of Zachary's Pizza, The Nantucket, Chicken Express and J's Garden), tasted and smelled them as well.

What the dickens! A dickens of a time!

Attended the Dickens Fair at the San Francisco Cow Palace today by the generosity of TigerDan from the FTE forum - thanks for the comp. tickets. We were some of the first people there who were spectators, as opposed to costumed (?) participants and the latter may have outnumbered the former. Since we were there early, we got to see the "anticipatory set" in which the participants playing characters from the novels were introduced. Other cool things - ¡Dan's band!; the corset shop windows; the sugared almonds whose smell always makes me weak in the knees and for which I can never resist paying the $4.75 at these things. Um ... OK, wait, lest you think I attend every ye olde event that comes to town, by never and "these things" I mean both times! Or four. Anyway, the atmosphere of the Dickens Fair was very much like the Renaissance Faire or the NorCal Pirate Festival. Varrrh, ye got me - I went to the Pirate Festival twice! We can have nice (?) things! In fact, the Pirate Festival trumps the Dickens Fair for one reason - henna tattoo booth.

Vallejo Waterfront

No, the "Ren Faire" does not get a link. Nor have I ever worn a costume to any of these events. Neither my geekiness nor the arms I use to embrace it stretch that far, despite the pangs of regret I sometimes feel at not having at least busted out an all-purpose corset and peasant blouse.

¿Property assessment?

I know this blog has been viewed internationally. And as a gift, it's been priceless al estilo Master Card, but the cost of taking String of Lights out into the world(wide web) would be rent/a bunch of car payments!

The worst responses to the question, "Is this outfit OK?"

1. "OK for what?"
2. "That looks like something your/my mom would wear!
3. "If you're going to wear something that comfortable, you better have on slutty underwear."
4. "I guess."
5. "No hablo inglés."

Joy to the World

Three Dog Night
My time wasting du jour (the online part of it, anyway) revealed that Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World", according to some readers of Spinner.com, has the 3rd best opening lyrics. This prompted me to do a bit of research on the first pop song I remember hearing. I was three and we'd gone to the lake. As we walked in to a waterfront café, the song was playing on a jukebox. I liked it. That day was cold and I also remember having an absolute hissy fit, wailing at the top of my lungs, because the beach was covered with dead fish - and no, the connection to the lyric "Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea" was not lost on me, even then. But, back to the findings. My first source revealed that Hoyt Axton wrote the song and a few seconds later I found this image on a very lovingly prepared website dedicated to Axton's music.


Seeing Axton's name occasioned another stop on memory lane. After Mom died, I was looking through her day planners (I found them back to 1994 or 1995 - tax reasons) and in one of the Address/Phone number sections I came across the almost surreal entry "Hoyt Axton" followed by a Bitterroot phone number (the 777). Yes, he did live in Victor at the time she lived in Missoula, but I'll probably never know why Mom had Hoyt Axton's phone number...

We can have some nice things

Pond with decorations on Tennessee Street. I'm not sure if the skin doctor or the CPA constructed the pond.



Vintage Chevy and vintage Hamm's beer trailer on Alabama St.



Persimmon tree in neighbor's yard.

¿¿¿Why are they even at Goodwill in the first place???

I came out of Goodwill yesterday to find my Subaru jam-parked between two Mercedes-Benz, one so recently purchased it didn't even have plates. As I cranked the steering wheel and inched forward, then back, then forward, then back, then forward,then back, then forward,then back, then forward until I could finally pull out onto Tennessee St. I raged, in a fit of reverse clasismo (?) "Why the fuck are you materialistic rich bitches shopping at Goodwill in the first place? Probably one of you beat me to that $20 bookshelf, like you can't go get a brand new one...Oh wait, are your car payments so high that you actually can't? But, hah! Even if you did buy that bookshelf, it won't even fit in your trunk whereas it would slide with no effort on my part into the back of my PAID OFF station wagon!"

Why I was at Goodwill this time: It was part of the quest for jeans that fit and that had no stretch. Jackpot! One pair of Levi's, one pair might have been from Spain (brand Ermenegildo Zegna - saw stores called that in Spain), and the other a pair of Wranglers that I wore last night to Chris' western-dress party. I think all 3 were actually men's jeans as the sizes were all a waist size x an inseam length. Those numbers, while not covered by FERPA, will only be released to those who possess a legitimate academic need to know. I will, however, disclose that the Levi's tag, alarming, includes the adjective "husky".

Buying textbooks for next quarter doesn't count as holiday shopping

No, the books aren't strategically covering anything, as hot as that image (of someone other than your author) would be. Hey! Do you think that one of "those" projects a la Calendar Girls or the Hot Men of the Houston Fire Department calendar would be a good fund-raising idea for academic departments? And what would be the title of that semi-cerebral semi-smut?

_______________________________

P.D. Since I'm being inappropriate about books, here were my thoughts as I walked away from the book bins on A Street. I had just returned most of the books I'd checked out this quarter, retaining Ladies Who Lunge and El vampiro de la colonia Roma (as my fuck-off reading and jump on my reading list, respectively). Some of those books I'd checked out only Tuesday evening and as I watched those disappear into the slot, I felt I'd used them fast like cheap sluts - and worse, I'd neglected to appreciate the whole body, instead I'd fetish-ized only those parts that were of most interest to me.

_______________________

Between her fingernails

String of Lights has some bulbs out this week, as my attention has been focused on the papers that are due way too soon!

Cristina Marcos as Petra in Méndez-Leite's TV adaptation of Clarín's La Regenta

For the past few days I've been (like her co-protagonists Ana, Álvaro, Fermín, Paula and Víctor) at the mercy of Petra, that manipulative little vixen par excellence of late nineteenth century Spanish literature. I think I'm finally out from under her thumb, or as Petra herself might say, "entre las uñas". Hope to print out and turn in tomorrow the paper in which I analyze this character.

Then, on to examine a contrasting literary personage, Juana Manuela Gorriti, who attempts to create a sense of sisterhood in her community of Latin American writers and thereby foster a spirit of pan-americanism. Isn't it nicer, but not nearly as juicy a story, when we all cooperate?

Sensory overload 8/12/07

Cluster 7/12/07

String of Lights does not necessarily endorse this view, nor should it.

¿Tienes advil?

From the Urban Dictionary (www.urbandictionary.com)
2. advil
A great drug that despite common belief cannot relief [sic] misery, despair and anxiety.
- We broke up. Will Advil take the pain away?
- No.

For the last two nights I've had a headache. Tonight at Steve's Pizza with the Spanish Lit. class it reached its zenith while I was trying to maintain 3 separate conversations. I couldn't find my trusty ziploc of advils. There weren't even any rolling around loose in the bottom of any of my bags. Don't act so shocked, you've seen me take an advil (and other very necessary pharmaceuticals) retrieved from much worse places. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Here are places I've picked up that pill and taken it because it was a. one of my last or b. very expensive: 1-under the floormat in the car 2-my desk drawer 3-my kitchen floor 4-the car seat (i.e.my crotch) 5-the sidewalk in front of Sinn Fein's headquarters in Belfast. They've probably got me on camera dropping, then bending over to pick up 4 advils, contemplating them in my palm for half a second before knocking them back, and I don't care - my back was killing me that day and you know, that Advil didn't even really kick in until I belted down some Bushmill's with it, in an attempt to show that I support a truly united Ireland. Another nice combination is tonight's, Fioricet (in lieu of advil)/red wine (no, don't "...try to to make me go to re-hab...no, no no.").



In a desperate plea for comments, I invite you to answer me this: Where's the sketchiest place from which you've plucked a pill before popping it?

Exchange rate

Yo: Disculpa, J. ¿Esta parte del dedo (señalando la parte del dedo que no contiene la uña) se llama la yema?
J: Sí es la yema.

Me: Excuse me, J. This part of the finger (indicating pad of finger) is called "la yema"?
J: Yes, it's "la yema".

5 minutos más tarde....

J: Eh, perdón...¿Sor Juana es del siglo XVII o el XVIII?
Yo: (pensando,"¿Es el siglo uno más o uno menos que el año?") Del XVII.

J: Um, excuse me...Is Sor Juana from the 17th or 18th century?
Me: (thinking, "Is the century one more or one less than the year?") She's from the 17th.

Challenges today-

-starting the run
-continuing the run
-finishing the run
-keeping the "¿what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about?" expression off my face during Actividad 14 p. 524
-trying to stop for or at least not to mow down oblivious cyclists as they struggled in the rain
-reading my own writing

Writing is easy...

...you just sit down at a typewriter and cut open a vein.

-someone called Red Smith (?)

x3

Two days ago I saw one of the doubles. After lunch I walked up a new street on my way back to the hotel. When exploring a new town I always try to take a different route on the way back. While waiting at an intersection, I saw him approach, but it troubles me that I don't remember if our paths crossed on the parallel or on the perpendicular. He wore, like I did, a black velveteen jacket (his cut for him, of course), a scarf, gloves, jeans (his fit him better than mine fit me) and black boots (his heels lower than mine and silent as they hit the pavement). His hair is brown, like ours, and his eyeglasses, framed in dark red plastic. His expression, not morose, just pensive. His eyes startle me because they are not dark. They are that light color between green and blue that glass takes on when it's been polished by the sea. This leads me to believe that perhaps he is not my double, but yours. And if he is your double, then he is also hers (as are you). I slowed as our paths crossed. (Was it on the parallel or the perpendicular?) Our gazes crossed and I saw his lips start to barely curve upward. When we'd both crossed the street (the same street or intersecting streets, I don't remember) I turned around. He did not. I watched him walking, with your buoyant steps, until he was out of sight. In his hand was a plastic bag that I would have in mine a few moments later.

Hace dos días vi a uno de los dobles.

Feels like the first time

Este post se ha escrito desde Monterey, CA
wharf/heard but didn't see

Yesterday for the first time, or for the first time in a long time I...
...spent more time in a hotel room than out of it, re-reading Borges' El Aleph y otros cuentos under covers in bed in the freezing room.
...am delighted, intrigued, provoked, captivated by Borges' writing.
...used a hotel fitness center. I couldn't figure out the weights system.
...ran on a treadmill but couldn't bring myself to experience another "first", watching TV while working out. The programmability of treadmills could really help me to enhance my, um..."athletic performance", but keeping track of the speed/distance/heart rate was pretty stressful as it induced an orabora of guilt. The speed and distance readouts indicated that I wasn't going fast enough for my liking. But, each time I checked my heart rate, the number of beats per minute (excessive, according to the age table stuck to the dashboard) I felt I had to lower the speed.
...was asked to leave a restaurant (The Crown and Anchor in downtown Monterey) because they needed the table. At least the staff made the decent gesture of offering to buy us another beer.
...watched one of those contest/elimination shows "The Next Great American Band".
...did not blog!
...had cold hands! Purchased these gloves in Walgreen's shopping spree. Some lucky girls will receive some just like them for Christmas, if you (yes, I do mean you) have been very good all year.