·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
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Haptic: Aaron Shurin reading from King of Shadows, his new book from City Lights Publishers, at Small Press Traffic, San Francisco, 9.26.08

Haptic: Joanne Kyger introducing Anne Waldman’s reading at Small Press Traffic, San Francisco. 9.26.08

Haptic: Anne Waldman reading from diverse works at Small Press Traffic, San Francisco, 9.26.08

I am happy to announce that the Braunstein Gallery (San Francisco) will exhibit my haptics along with an exhibit of the early abstract, ceramic work of the late Peter Voulkos.The show will open on January 24, 2009. In January I will provide further details on what will be a Saturday afternoon opening. Needless to say, I am both challenged, pleased and excited by this extraordinary opportunity.

I have combined the history of Ackley Haptic entries into one piece here.

Friday Afternoon, August 29, 2008

I went over to the lovely Ackley family apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. For those who may not know, Bruce has been a member of the Rova Saxaphone Quartet for over 30 years. Bruce improvised - alternating between Soprano and Tenor - from 12:30 until 2, while I feverishly (it seemed) worked with and through several Faber-Castell india ink (B) brush tip pins! It was an honor to be in the midst of his sound, the shapes of which filled, animated and propelled my hand variously up and down and across the ‘toothy’ textured Arch rag paper. When we talked about it - without saying the word ‘duet’ - he suggested that my process gave his improvs a focus and shape. Indeed our work was feeding off each other’s.

We play again tomorrow in a house performance across the Bay. If we have the time, I will complete the other half of the page. In meantime, I dedicate the first half to Jim Wilson, once a friend, poet and early stalwart of the Haight-Ashbury in the late 1960’s. He - with fellow poet David Gitin - produced poetry readings and light shows at the old, now long gone Straight Theater. Jim passed away a couple of days ago. At times in the making of this haptic piece, I could sense his spirit, gregarious as always, floating through and revisiting his life in the Haight. Safe passage, dear Jim.

Saturday, August 30, noon to 2 o’clock.

Photo by Hilda Mendez, including all photos below.

Bruce and I went back at the haptic in progress during a lovely afternoon - among several other participating musicians - at the home of vocalist, Aurora Joesephson, in Oakland.

After 15 or so minutes -as a duet- we got to here:

I don’t know if this scaffolding of marks completely speaks to the vibrational intensity with which Bruce was bearing down on his horn, let alone the various flights that emerged as his sounds rose to pierce what seemed the highest of the upper-octaves, or descended to the darkest, lowest ones - meanwhile charming and breaching echos of older ’standards’, the melodies by which early jazz periods once lived. Or, who knows, and I did not ask, maybe the inference of tunes, no matter how imploding might have be Bruce’s unique creations, improvised ‘off the cuff’ so to speak. Though I suspect nothing by our hands, our breath, etc. is ever entirely original.

The physical motion in this photograph does - it seems to me - capture the vibrational intensity that I absorb, and re-release back through the pen on to the page!

Then we are joined by others here, and other than Aurora,
Liz Albee - electronic sound box
Jacob Lindsay - clarinet
Phillip Greenlief - tenor sax
Aurora Josephson - vocals
Zeus - cat
I like the juxtaposition of a temporary family of musicians against the large painting (musicians, dancers, et al), a creation, I believe, by Aurora’s mother - who is a painter in Portland. Certain archetypes never disappear!

A soprano sax, a clarinet, a tenor, plus an electronic box that makes multiple sounds, and Aurora, the vocalist who, much like a bird, I discover can release and bend (torque) her voice into pitches and tones, the way a good fabricator/sculptor can heat, extend and torque steel into tilted arcs of amazing resonance:

To my ear, the group’s sounds are tonal, as say different from melodic or song-like. It’s an improvisation that draws on sonority and resonance as a way of creating a space, a presence. There are entrances and retreats by the different instruments, but no baroque flurry and fireworks. It’s pleasingly tender without being sachrin at all. These folks have the confidence to respect, hear and play with each other. It’s is a treat to be embraced and adventure in and out and let my pen play with the diversity of sounds, twists, and tones.

And where to we get to, after 90 minutes?

I think the current piece is at the 80% mark toward completion. Bruce and I will give it a final go, hopefully this week. As much as I can say, I believe the baby is breathing. And I am grateful for the input of musicians who also each seemed to enjoy the process, as well.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

The Ackley Haptic (above) diptych did not work! I had kept working on the piece on my own while listening to cello pieces by Eric Friedlander on his album, Black Ice & Propane. The two drawings crowded and neutralized each other. I separated them into two independent works. (Surgery with the Kinkos’ paper-cutter!) The first one, now called the Ackley Haptic. above, is entirely with Bruce Ackley, while he played either on tenor or soprano saxophone.

The second,(below), as shown in a previous entry, includes Bruce Ackley, Aurora Josephson (voice), Phillip Greenleaf (saxophone), and Jacob Linsday (clarinet), plus a later topping of Eric Friedlander’s cello solos on a CD called Black Ice & Propane. I call this work the Aurora/Ackley Haptic

Enjoy.

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Recently I heard David Highsmith read his poems at Books & Bookshelves, a store here in San Francisco. David is also the proprietor of the shop. It’s in an old, relatively raw Victorian storefront at the corner of 15th & Sanchez. Indeed, David sells mainly unfinished wooden bookshelves, chairs, and such, and has done so for the last 20 years. (It is also a great bookstore for poetry books). Back to the reading!. What was fascinating to me about the initial part of David’s reading was the way the language was informed by the codes and language for maintaining a business establishment in the City; electrical codes, Inspectors, permits, violations, formal instructions permeated the poem’s consciousness. Later I told David that he was “writing like Charles Reznikoff.” However, instead of writing from the perspective of being out on the New York streets, his poems were the document of a business-life as lived between four walls. There was a factual credibility about the work, about the restraints and controls that infuse the consciousness of such a life. David brings an ironic, solid, ‘have to do it, goddamn it, vitality about working/living within such conditions - which are no doubt similar to anyone running a small business. The poetry provides an ‘on-the-ground’ enduring quality about it - in fact, I suspect one way to endure such City codes are to call them to attention, write about them and expose them. Not that anything will change. It’s mainly refreshing to see someone to take off the veneer to reveal the infrastructure and operations of a daily life. David’s work will not let you pretend otherwise - there is no false ‘customer-face’ here.

Vis-a-vis this work, quite by accident the other day I found myself taking this photograph while thinking simultaneously of Ferdinand Leger, the artist. In fact, I thought I had just encountered Leger’s ghost:

I don’t know that Leger was ever a super-popular artist. The work does not appeal to a bourgeois French or Modern taste, as say, in 19th Century Impressionist art, or, more particularly, the cubist project of Braque and Picasso, though Leger’s work is clearly indebted to their example. His work, going back to Highsmith, is too implicated in the factual character of industrial structures, as say, for example, his focus and rendering of the complications and turns of building pipes, those wonderful twists and cylindrical inter-weaves of metal that climb up the sides and sky-wells of City buildings. Of course, as in this picture, he had a love for the metal structures of bikes, and helmets, and cyclist fashions, and all the structural shapes and color patterns that the diverse elements offered his eye and brush.

It was nice to catch as fragment of Leger’s ghost locked around a street-sign pole. Welcome Ferdinand, and, you, too, David, now that you have met! Park as long as you want!

No. 1
On September 26 - last Wednesday evening - the San Francisco State Poetry Center hosted an evening at the Unitarian Church in which poets either or both read works or remembered moments with the late Philip Lamantia, the City’s most distinguished surrealist poet, and surrealist in the fullest, educated sense of that often abused moniker. Poets included Garret Caples (who has taken a real responsibility for keeping Lamantia’s work in view), Brian Lucas, Andrew Joron, Neeli Cherkovski, Adam Cornford, J. Vale (Re/Search editor and publisher). Nancy Peters, former City Light’s publisher and the poet’s widow, was to be there but was stuck in the Sierras with a broken down car. (I promise to get the right spellings on everybody’s name.) There was also a video of Lamantia reading a few of his works.

No. 2

It was a great evening in ways that I cannot fully engage here. At the moment anyway! However, the diverse readings of Lamantia got me straight into making haptics - letting my India ink brush and hard edged pens get taken by the texture (shapes, moves, tones et al) of the evening’s language.
I will not try here to further articulate whether the haptic, my use of this process - as a means of dictation from spoken parole to haptic script - fits into the surreal canon (!!). What follows are thre of the four pieces; I gave one immediately to Andrew Joron in response to his terrific reading of two or three of Lamantia’s poems. In fact, I would say Andrew’s own work - the depth of his investigations - takes its lead from Lamantia’s research and work. (Andrew says he will send me a scan of the piece).

No. 3

Betsy Davids is a friend, as well as long time editor and publisher of Rebis Press books.
I obviously have to correct the spelling of Philip in my captions!

Haptic: Rob Halpern and Taylor Brady reading from “Snow Sensitive Skin” (Atticus Finch) at Books & Bookshelves in San Francisco. September 10, 2008.

Rob & Taylor read separately from their own work, then collaboratively, back and forth, sometimes in unison, from their new, already out of print(!) volume. Taylor opened their collaborative work with a letter from a Palestinian musician and artist who lives within the Israeli occupation of Palestine. A constant witness to the violence (missles, bombs, et al) about him, he questions the usefulness of art and the nature of his despair. However, the work that Rob and Taylor let emerge from this letter, an extended meditation, was not representational in some faux representational sense; it was an intimately felt exploration of the mental and physiological edges of being under seige, and the implications (personal, political) of being joined in that seige. The poem’s words operate as kinds of tendrils through which a music tightly and variously emerges, improvisations on the immediate embrace of horror - the sound of which may be as simple as an extended scratch on a blank piece of paper.
The haptic here is but a tracing of the shapes and movements of the poets reading, their sounds, layering, cross-hatching, sometimes, barely touch the paper, the pen gently floats in the way a bird will take a break, circling away from its nest while, other times, the pen slows down into a content appropriate intense squiggle as a siren from the local fire station revs up while the engine wheels out on to the street.

Fortunately, I am told, the volume, Snow Sensitive Skin will be reprinted, and what is obviously a very important work will be back for a larger audience in the public realm.

Malevich, an early autumn ghost!

There, Malevich, you appear again! Searing the eye - from the scaffold - at the corner of Frederick and Stanyan. Your once severe, tight, flat structure now an aging, feminine, seductive fullness. The outline of the silvery Cross still immanent. The way at night a ghost will open dark drapes, intervene & become luminous, awesome, haunting!

My mother – latent poet, novelist, or moralist - what can one say? Even in her protracted waning, she often remains an intrigue, a mysterious, abbreviated source of well-coined observations. Though often, other than an “I don’t know”, she lacks words at all. She has given up grasping for them, or selecting alternative words for the ones she might have used in more articulate times. She is on the threshold now. Or, sometimes, from what she says, one gets the sense there is a part of her that has already separated from the living.

“Can you tell me where is my life?” She popped the question last Saturday, after we had gotten her up from a long nap; I was sitting her down at the kitchen table.

“Can you tell me where is my life,” she repeats. It was if she was possessed by a strong sense that she was empty, that her soul or spirit had taken flight elsewhere, gone to a place that neither her present consciousness, nor body can follow.

During the week my brother says she wakes up every few hours, often carrying on conversations. To whom she is talking is not evident. Most recently she asked that some boxes had to be filled and distributed elsewhere. Then offered that her son, my late brother Chris, “needs assistance.”

My mother – as I suspect is often true of the dying – is making her psychic preparations for her final departure. It’s as if she is actively transforming her interior psychis space into an archive. Whether or not she has a particular library in mind into which to deposit her memory, I have no idea. There is, maybe, just this idea she is compelled to get emptied out.

Yesterday, at the kitchen table before dinner, I asked, “How old are you.”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“You are 92, Mom.”
“I don’t think so.”
“How old do you think you are?”
“I am dead.”
“Why do you say that, Mom.” I laugh.
“I have been here too long.”
“Well, Mom, you can go when you want to. You are a very interesting character. We will miss you when you are gone.”
“I will miss you, too.”
“I will write some stories about you.”
As if there is something else on the table, she turns her head up from her small dinner plate of cantelope pieces and chicken salad and looks me right in the eye.
“Will they be good or bad?” She seems to like the idea, but wants to be well portrayed.
“Good.”I say, though already feel I have been manipulated to serve her interests without mixing the good and the bad.
I don’t elaborate. We eat, and after reading her a brief tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, (ny new favorite book, the David Raeburn translation, a Penguin Classic edition) I take her back to bed.
“You are beautiful, mom.”
“Really?”
“Don’t you think so?
“I have never really thought about it.”
That’s my mother to the end. Not about to be associate with vanity of any sort. Pride? Well, that’s another issue.