·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

Are you feeling inadequate?
Is the body not quite what it should be?
Are things out of joint?
Is the physical exterior lacking?
Are you missing a corrective?
Do you want to be corrected?
Do you want to be brought close to perfect?

The Design here and the implication of many more.
The City provides the right opportunities to be put at one’s service.
The high impact of good Design is measurable.
Count on it!

Alternatively - if the exterior is in good shape -
There are services for the interior. Whatever is whacky
What nut might be loose, what is wrong with your coupling
What family secrets that baffle your decision making power
Whatever City thing (drugs, booze, depression) has done you in
Whatever may be daunting the accomplishment of a certain happiness
We have it, we have it for you, we have it right here:

Go for it. Bless yourself. To ask for and receive help is natural
Shape up and prepare to receive it. You will be corrected
Find a workable perfection and be pleased to be much more completely
Acceptable living amongst your peers, family and lovers.

This, of course, is all presented, “tongue in cheek.” I am actually sweetly astonished (always) by the signage with which businesses will play upon and build their clientele on one’s anxieties: essentially one’s fundamental fear that one is not perfect, but with the right services, technology - either, in these cases, the dental hardware or the psychological software - one can achieve a modicum of perfection, an equality with the perfection of ideal peers, etc.

You, too, can be a City Slicker, sharp and beautiful as a jewel - and definitely a step up on anything in your suburban or rural past.

A peculiar American comedy in which Death is never mentioned.

Signage photographs are from businesses in the Financial District, San Francisco, California

The white armed stranger
Will not bear Katrina
The arms ghosted:
History a wound, the wounded
History a series of holes
The stacato imprint
Stenciled wires to the heart:

The simple blue eyed stranger
Not the Forest Ranger, nor lover:
History not the tender scab
Torn back, the small screech:

Amnesia - the ghosts bleed
The Nation, the black holes:
The Doctor’s in, the Doctor’s out
Amnesia rules the country
X on the right
X on the left (holes):

The not so simple blue eyed
Scotch tape, needle, clipboard & pen
Blue eyed not so simple (bonus)
Such a (ghost) (hole)
What can one do?
What can one absolutely do?

The merciless, indeed, merciless
More than curious on these premises
Who are you, tell us, announce it loud and clear
Why have you come down, Stranger?
History (ghosted) already
Good-bye. We loved you
Slipping down, way down
Back then history
Such holes you bring, you insist:
A callous belligerance
No one understands, Stranger.

Newspaper Stand, downtown San Francisco, Califonrnia
October 2005.

“Let us remember too, that we don’t have to translate… pictures into realistic ones in order to ‘understand’ them, any more than we need translate photographs into colored pictures, as though black-and-white men or plants in reality would strike us as unspakably strange and frightful. Suppose we are to say at this point ’something is a picture only in a picture-language.’”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophical Grammar: Part I, The Proposition, and its Sense : Part II, On Logic and Mathematics

On some level here, Wittgenstein is saying a picture is a ghost - or that taking a picture is transforming - whatever the object may appear to be - into a ghost. Art, by definition is a language and, by extension, a dialog with ghosts. Some ghosts are much more interesting than others. For example, what passes as public media (journalism) is most often a series of bad, one might say, ‘false ghosts.’ “Giving up the ghost” is the way a good artist or poet transforms a ghost into legibility, a “picture language.” To do otherwise - as an artist or writer - is to operate in bad faith.

It is also why a “ghost” of what was provokes a deep sense of lament. What was is not only no longer here, but the language of its (the ghost’s) reappearance violates the original site, whatever is personal to one’s memory. What was once an image in “living color” is now in black and white. Or, if still in color, as when altered by digital software, such as offered by Adobe Photoshop. At the same time - or perhaps subsequently - while or when we are seduced by the new, ghost language, ‘the art’, we are provoked into sorrow as we instinctively acknowledge the loss, the shadow of the memory of the ‘original’ person or object.

Yet, isn’t the illusion, the appearance of permanence in the well made, preserved ‘art object’, the very thing that one finds an uplifting, a balm to an otherwise state of woe - the persistence of grief (the “quiet life of desperation”) without terms or redemption? A good image, a “picture language” is, someone has said “a walk away lover” - a courtship, a marriage to ….well, you tell me.

Curious the way she tilts her head, the even arches of her eyes, the pale blue shadow over just the one. One eye, over the porch, takes you in; the other - curtains primarily drawn - holds one back. With appropriate decorum, the lady will permit you to enter. Knock or ring the bell, but never too loudly. Come into my living room, she says. We will be cautious with the amount of light, the upper curtains open only at a slight angle. No one will be able to hear of what we speak. The conversation between us is as if we hold a pale blue, ceramic bowl of ripe, dark red cherries. Note how the slice of sunlight silvers their skins. We speak in slow measure, calibrating each moment’s taste. Yes, indeed, we live in a different century. Sustained by the architect’s careful geometries - the arches - we pleasure in restraint, the art of slow disclosure. If you are anxious, as some are, be calm. No one dies here. This is not eternity. If you will, however, please care for the memory: voices carefully joined, a resonance - dark varnished interior woods, the imagination, the slow carpentry that defines us.

Victorian house on 21st. Street, between Guerrero & Valencia, San Francisco

What is Mars doing up on the side of my fish market?
Why does he look so gloomy?
Are the wars going that badly? Does he have aesthetics
About whether one is a beauty, or one a trash job?
Is it all over? Those beautiful wars, Homer’s muscular account
All of that? What will one find in the fish market?
The tenderness of Swordfish, Red Snapper, the white Squid?
Have they put the Vice President on Ice?
Is the President at rest in the Freezer?
Why does Mars look like he’s about to cry?
Sorrows of War. Sorrows of the Heart.
Lament. Lament. What will come home?
One sad, stupid history tucked inside
The Butcher’s taped, white paper wrap.

“End.War”, side facade, Mission Fish Market, Bartlett just off 22nd Street, San Francisco, California

My mother keeps a ghost upon
Her hand carved chest. You lift
And open the lock with a certain fear
You know what lies within
Emptiness or Spirits:
What flies there?
What cries there?
Who knows the configurations -
The silks, the cottons, the wool
She might have otherwise - in multiples -
Delicately woven, folded, kept?
I knew a woman once
The coffin outside her house
Deep under the family Oak
At night a thread sped forth
From behind the wooden latch
Across the lawn and up the porch
The white thread wound to
Take her life - in one quick jerk -
By the flute of her delicate throat.
Night after night I sit and wonder
Who is the ghost - what can she tell me? -
Latched to the lock upon my mother’s chest.

Detail of wooden chest and lock, carved by Barbara Moore Vincent,
circa 1939, Richmond, California.

To be among ghosts. To suffer the breath

Fiercely. Graciously.

Political Poster Wall, outside former Mission Police Station, on Valencia, between 23rd & 24th Street, San Francisco, California

What abandon! What was abandoned? Golden dappled in the morning light. To make love - the ghosts - like no other. Up ended, variously crushed: not one item - couch or pillow - without an imprint, a sensual slant. When we make love we switch the character of the universe. Rough and tumble, some ghost - one hears - said that. Whatever rises, one trembles: the unmistakable gold aura, the not so casual imprint, a testimony - the couch - a fertile, indeed delightful, awesome you can tell me when I ride, bring me all the way back home: to live, to wake.

Abandoned couch above the trolley track, Dolores Park, San Francisco, California

We live in a fading country.
My wife said that.
I am not married.
My country is an ex-wife.
She has moved in with a violent man.
She lives behind curtains. Flags. Signals.
Not a ghost.
Not a ghost of a chance.

Window on 22nd Street, between Guerrero and Valencia, San Francisco, California.

The shot house.
Who does not shoot the house?
Right through the shield.
Note the way the house tilts.
Who does not take it to the heart?
The shot ghost house.
Tilted.

Bullet through windshield & reflection; 19th Street near Church Street, San Francisco, California