·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
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A thought:
Engraved juxtapositions intrigue the eye, jog thought, and create an opening to wonder! I was stopped dead cold when I came across this interesection of two kinds of lettering. The way the fraction of the street name - in firm, stenciled Roman letters - faces the contrasting incision of handmade forms. Each presence here an evocation in what was recently wet and fresh cement.
The Roman letters in perfect order, the combination of which evoke the legislative power of the State to define, name and determine streets and boundaries. Indeed, not just the boundaries of property and the requiste powers of owners and users, but typography as evocation of the State’s power to impose limits and regulate human behavior, for example, what is legal, what is not. A vision of typography as an instrument that refines and draws out the best among human actors on the public stage. A classical formality at its strongest against an otherwise savage wilderness of potential bad actors, each imbued with destructive impulses.
The hand-scripted letters argue for the opposition against the classical claim, actively demonstrate the active, spontaneous release of whatever is repressed, whatever is honest and true. Under muncipal law, the public pronouncment LAURA THE ITALIAN LUSH, whether true or false, is bald, and potentially libelous expression. Yet, here it is, letters sunk in the fresh cement, cheek by jowl with the Roman authorities who - for centuries now - permanently control the naming, and the choice of names that go upon the streets.Unfettered romantic life, criminal life, whatever life of abandon and feeling, versus the security and relief found in the icons and typefaces that represent the preservation of muncipal order.

When the eye follows the street closely, the melodrama of human facts - sweet to terrible - is at play everywere. Or so it appears. The ancestors - those Romans - layed down the rules. Curious, and rather wonderful, the children and the young confront them everywhere. The City, and its local owners, ready fresh cement to lay down new cover over each new scriptural in-lay. At dusk, in the last light, the children, like young poets, alight with their fingers, phrases, and fresh script on the ready. Round and round it goes. Formality and not. Type and not. Song’s provocation. Totally.

A few entries back, I pictured and wrote of my 90-year old mother’s respose to the publication of her poem in the poet Jow Lindsay’s edit of the London based journal, Everyone’s Cup of Tea.
In a more recent entry, in my response to a my photo of a public text piece by Lawrence Weiner on a building near the corner of Grenwich and Canal Street, I quoted my mother’s response to Kenneth Rexroth’s translation of this ancient Chinese poem:

BY THE CITY GATE

A year ago today by
This very gate your face and
The peach blossoms mirrored each
Other. I do not know where
Your beautiful face has gone.
There are only peach blossoms
Flying in the Spring wind.

Tsui Hao

After my mother listened to the poem, she said, “That’s potent.” And when I asked why, she simply and confidently stated, “Because nothing interferes with it.”

I used her quote in describing my take on the power of the sight/site of Weiner’s text piece.

Ironically, on account of the blog piece, I was contacted by Pamela Kember,
Lecturer in Art History & Theory at the Hong Kong Art School. This week, she informed, she was opening the first museum exhibit in China of Lawrence Weiner’s work. She was pleased to find a picture of this outdoor work with which she was unfamiliar, but, in preparing her lecture for the opening of the exhibit, she wanted to know which Chinese poem my mother was responding to, and furthermore, she might indeed quote my mother’s statement as part of the lecture.

I was sweetly astonished by this chance ‘blog contact’ experience! Maybe, needless to say, I cannot really begin to describe the abstract nature and content of Lawrence Weiner’s work and intentions to my mother. Though, if she did see reproductions of some of his pieces, she would probably be frank and say the work “is beyond me.” But then I could also be surprised.

Nevertheless, it is kind of amazing to see my mom, all in the space of a month, have a poem published in London, and, then, quoted in the Hong Kong art world! Well, she was a very public politician for much of her life. It’s perhaps all of a lifelong performance piece. First definitions, lasting definitions.

Winter Lantern

When I was a young I lived in Paris and was haunted, troubled and teased by Magritte. It was that lantern. It was there before in Baudelaire. The one that took one into strange buildings, deep caverns, odd twisted stairways, the clammy odor of an old earth. The lantern in the painting, and the one in the poem, led you into the strange depths of an old City, built upon an older City, built on even an older one than that. It was not that you would meet old demons or dragons or an old ancestor who might still proclaim and seek vengeance for an ancient betrayal. It was much more deathly than that. The lantern was the proclamation of an eternity. It had no wick or light. On any day it might just pronounce itself through the singular presence of a window, one or two levels above the street. A land of no night or day. The still clarity of a transparent blue ice cube. Not a shadow. The odd sense of an invitation to go nowhere, and somewhere, simultaneously. A three ball billiard table without either a cue or pocket. A town clock without hands. Yet, the chilling simplicity. The lantern’s singular command, at once, foreboding to a fault. Follow me not.

…Oh, that travelling salesman. And, enthused, I bought away from the long procession of vowels in pajamas… from Where Shall I Wander by John Ashberry.

On the street on Sunday I encountered a slightly drunk black man in a black t-shirt with a four-row high, horizontal grid of twelve, variably configured black and white squares. Each white square contained a black capital, block-shaped consonant (D, N, P, X, etc). Each of the black squares was empty.

Under the grid - in white scripted letters - was the query:

Can You Sell Me A Vowel?

Presumably, if one could ‘buy’ the right white vowels, they could fill the empty black spaces. Instead of the site of edgy, disparate consonants, the grid would be transformed into ‘real’ words. Without knowing these words in advance, one might assume that the grid would reveal a new found harmony, a kind of microcosm, the creation of a clarity, and the shirt would give, at least for a moment, a formal order to the universe.

I am not sure if because the man was an African-American - so often disenfranchised from so much in this country - that the dissonance in the shirt was made even more striking.

I asked him where got the great shirt. It looked brand new.
“I got it at some festival 10 years ago. Finally decided to put it on today.”

I was tempted to ask if I could buy the shirt off his back. But he looked so great in it. In fact, I liked the idea of him, this sunny afternoon, as he did, continue to walk down the street and letting the striking shirt - its grid of no vowels and un-conjoined consonants - give the comfortable appearing public a certain edge, a particular vision of reality, a glimpse between order and not order, words and not words, provision and not provision.

A walking poem, yes, indeed.

Black homeless man under red blanket on basketball court,
eight o’clock, morning, Dolores Park, San Francisco, February 2007.

Asleep at the border, what he dreams I do not know. His black fingers barely visible between the black hood and blanket. A dream perhaps of royal plays – a history of jump shots going down, slam dunks and blocked shots, a body risen so high over the hoop, he went by the name of Bird.

Perhaps, more profoundly, a history of friends, competition, bravado and love. A collective, a collective cure. Rhythm of ball, rhythm of court, combat, an electricity incised among flesh, heart and ‘flying elbows.’

The two stout, well-heeled leather shoes with thick, vibrum soles. An insistence, a sustained confidence, an enduring, unwavering fidelity to the spring, the power, the multiple plays at ready in the feet.

May he rest in peace, dream in glory.

Death is the start of sentiment.

Barbara Moore Vincent - my almost 91 year-old mother – is now published in London. everyone’s cup of tea #1, a magazine edited by poet and performer, Jow Lindsay, and published by Bad Press. I recently received the publication here in San Francisco. I soon took her copy over to the family home across the Bay in Richmond. After dinner, and over the breakfast table, I first read her some prefatory dialogue with her that included her interpretations of some lines from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and, since her eyes can no longer make out small print, I read her poem aloud:

January will open the horrible threat.

But not for me.

Previously when I had read and reminded her of the poem, she had no memory of making it, and I would have to persuade her that I was not the author. But this Friday evening, perhaps because of the presence of the magazine, she was clearly delighted to claim ownership and reflect on and interpret the situation of the making the original poem. As is our habit, she spoke, while I wrote down the following:

“I was not very happy with the way things were going.
I just think there came a point in my life
where none of the old-time dreams
ever mounted the stairs.
And I did not want them to leave those things
you depended on because you were
so fond of them. They disappeared from
every day life. There are so many wonderful
times when people take the time to talk to you
and you do not want them to leave.
But, then, that would be quite boring. You want them
to move on but, at the same time, keep on being with you.”

I read the poem a second time:

“Those (lines) are quite potent, don’t you think?
They are just kind of deep in me. I can remember I felt
I wasn’t being fair. But I would not have anything left
if I did not put down something. Don’t you think?”

She pauses:

“I just didn’t want to think anymore. I am afraid things
will be so tumbled down, or caved in, all the things
that have happened in my life. I would like very much
to let the world be happy – but the one around us
is not a happy one. It’s a tumble down, squirting life.”

And that is pretty much where we left the poem’s discussion, which I thought was pretty remarkable, particularly her clarity about loss, and a “no blink” view of her world,
one so counter to the feisty, combative political optimism and struggle that I vividly remember from my childhood. Ironically, this evening, she is in wonderful spirits and so enjoys pressing her hands down on the pages of the magazine.