·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
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Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, Monday, 9 - 10am, March 30, 2009. Corner of 21st & Sanchez, San Francisco. April winds already precede the final edge of March; quick chill slashes and swirls, conical and spiral - charge and ignite the pen’s multiple flights, a kind of “winged” dance - this way and that.

Plagiary smokes the body. One can watch the fumes. Occasionally, cliche says there is a stench. Yet, a clarity may clear the skin, penetrate the pores and dismiss some rankerous sweat. He climbs the tallest mountain in the neighborhood. Jumping up and down in place, two men and three women submit to the trainer’s whip. She calls for help from the top of a tree. He holds on for dear life in the ocean, his fingers barely grip the overturned edge on the kayak. She refuses to lie down and do nothing on the beach in Maui. He leaves the bar after one drink. Constantly there is a demon in the mix. No one looks for long over the back of their shoulder. The goal bound halfback runs the ball out of the stadium.

In a Doctor’s Office, he looks at a 93 year-old woman with a deep forefinger gash. The blood runs frequent. The blood runs hard. When he puts the needle in to make the first stitch, she stares right at him and shouts, you son-of-a-bitch!

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Note:For each of the first 100 days of the Obama regime, I have been making a haptic drawing with reflective commentary - sometimes directly political, sometimes not - on public and personal events of this unique period. What is a haptic? I like to think of the drawings as a kind of script, a poetry without words. On a most simple level, the drawings are a combination of the eye and ear in sensual response to whatever may be in the immediate landscape - the news, a basketball game, the sounds coming in over the back porch, etc.

On April 29th, the 100th Day of Obama, the Steven Wolfe Gallery (49 Geary Street, San Francisco), will exhibit all 100 drawings in a 580 square foot grid upon one of the Gallery walls. A book - which will be published by the Gallery on that day - will include 99 of the drawings and edited texts from this blog. On that day, I will sit in the Gallery and make the haptics and texts for the final two empty pages for an edition limited to 35 copies. Subsequently a non-limited edition will be produced with the final haptic and text,
If you are interested in either edition, or more information about the show, please email me with the address in the sidebar.
& yes, please feel free to explore the blog for the 67 Obama entries that precede this one!

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, Sunday, 10-11am, March 29, 2009
The Redwood Tree to the front, its black edged deep red bark; the insistent basketball dribble & echo from the playground court; the intensity of hot morning sun against the beige linen sheets, freshly hung. Drawn to drawing, a morning worship into the present.

The heart shreds with no consistency.

in Washington.

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, 3 - 4 p.m, Ferry Point, Point Richmond, March 28, 2009.
Bench overlooking channel, stone breakwater, sail and motor boats. A billowed out white jib with red triangle corners is saturated with afternoon light. Blades on a small motor make a steady white scribble on the dark water. Floating ducks with tall black necks; singular, thin vertical white stripes down their throats to the breast. Certain snakes look like those throats.

There is a man who defines history by his collection of finely polished, vintage, antique cars. He keeps them in a warehouse on an industrial site near the Bay. He prefers two-seaters to the ones with back seats. When young, we might deduce that he did not like double-dates. He liked best to go out as a couple and show off both car and girl.

At a minimum, it is the responsibility of a good citizen to find oneself inside a well made sentence. One or several. It’s ironic how many come up short on this account. Maybe it is the nature of Fate to totally dismiss the memory of some or many of us. Maybe it is our best nature to work to defeat Fate on that one particular account.

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, Friday, 8:30-9:30 AM, March 27, 2009.
Morning from a bench overlooking Dolores Park in warm, spring sun; high voices of Chinese women walkers, padding sound of jogger shoes, trolley cars, heavy trucks, sirens, plane engines: the porous ambience.

The President looks up from his Oval Office desk. His eyes skirt from left to right, a relaxed curl to the fist tucked under his chin. “Afghanistan, in fact, all those “stans”, Pakistan, etc. Everyone predicts that’s what will take me down. Iraq took the former holder, Iran almost took Reagan, Vietnam definitely took LBJ, and Korea almost took Harry T. Well, well, well. Logically, should that be my legacy? To be frank, it’s probably anybody’s bet. No, I am not letting the junkyard dogs in either State or the Pentagon take us either further in or out. And, no, I am not ready to see dominoes, in particuliar, nuclear ones. That is, Pakistan plotting to drop the big AB on India. Frankly, I am not sure what we’re plotting. Signals, of course. A few more troops into Afghanistan along the border to let all the players know that we can be quick on their tail. But, fundamentally, we have to figure out politically how to bring them all to the table, or tables. We need one or two more George Mitchell types to eyeball the landscape and negotiate an upturn. To get everybody’s fingers off those triggers - whether A-Bomb or Roadside. It isn’t clear right now. There are too many poppies blurring the landscape.

Heah. It’s March Madness. Villanova just took out Duke. Downside flips Upside. It always freshens the picture. I am off to be with my wife and kids. ”

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, Thursday, 9 - 10AM, March 2009.
Back porch landing, 733 Guerrero, San Francisco: birds, the scraping sounds next door of a house painter preparing windowsills for a primer coat; sunshine on my back. Kids in a playground, the way their voices at “recess” swell. The sound of ball being kicked hard, no doubt high into the air, taking the voices into the arc.

“Yes”, Obama says, “the children and the budget. Their health, my health, the health of our spouses, our friends, our elders. A private system of drugs and care, such that it is, rakes the money off the top, sides and insides of everyone’s potential and/or constantly sick and/or dying body. Soon one and three folks will be over sixty years of age. Some say this issue of Health will be by Katrina, my Iraq, etc. All I can say is that I will not forbid photography of the fallen, those visual reminders that we are mortal. No matter our flaws, it is only proper that we offer everyone the right to die well, with attention, including an appropriate consecration of our memory to the vitality of those who once lived amongst us. These memories of the dead sustain the living in ways that assure that we pay attention to the quality, measure and justice of our citizens. Is that too much to ask? I think not. If we do not insure our health, aren’t we all fated to breathe some plague upon the inevitable winds that may as well slay us? Reasonable minds and history tell us we should expect no less. Insurance for all is but a minimum prerequisite.

By the way, you folks out there on your Blackberries, I-phones and whatever works for you, did you enjoy the Town Meeting today? I must say it literally tickles me when I sense your fingers touching those keys with messages for all of us here at the White House. It keeps things preciously intimate, democratic and intimate. Needless to say, healthy as it is, I like that. Good day, gentlemen and gentle women. ”

Haptic: The First One Hundred Days of President Obama, 5:45 - 7 PM, March 25, 2009.
An impulsive television channel mix: Keith Olberman on Countdown, the Boston Celtics vs. the Orlando Magic, the Dallas Mavericks vs. the Golden State Warriors.

When they ask the President why he chuckles? “It’s gallows humor,” he chuckles back.
“No, I am not, definitely not referring to Emmett T. or Billie H. Indeed I am talking about Strange Fruit. But not the black & hanging sort. They have different techniques now anyway. That, mind you, don’t even permit humor. Unless you want to imagine - as some do - the former VP chuckling. What did his buddies call it, The Waterboard Chuckle. No, we are not chuckling that way. Call it giddiness, the kind when you are a kid doing the tightrope, or walking along the thin edge of a steep cliff. Take Iraq, mix Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, Gaza, Iran, A.I.G. and that volcano exploding non-stop up in Alaska - you get my perilous drift. Sometimes, to get back to the gallows humor bit, I do have days when you wish you could hang to keep from falling.

Part of the curious joy of this Office is to keep everyone hanging just to a point.”

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, Tuesday, 6 - 7 PM, March 24, 2009.
CNBC Television, Countdown, the Keith Oberman show.

“A continuous fabric (nerve movie?) Exactly as wide as these lines…”

Philip Whalen, unbeknownst to himself, that is, he may have thought he was only defining the fabric of his poems (the way the words gather, form and move across a page); he was also defining the day to day process of making of these haptics, as they too, gather from the inner and outer world, to take on these forms that open up before the eye. A “nerve movie?” Especially today! You better believe it!

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, Monday, March 23, 2009, 9-10 AM. Corner of 21st & Sanchez.
Mating upon mating, the birds. The agitation to let the haptic pen make and go with the script!

Despair begins to animate the makers, producers and readers of literal print. Print, the execution of print on paper - like certain beautiful ice formations around the poles of the earth - is in the process of disappearing. Book editors, book designers, and book printers are folding up their shops. The bookstore, like the paper newspaper is disappearing. There is an unspoken hysteria among the makers, the lovers, and vendors. There is a disbelief that the shrine of civilization - the store and its books - has become a site of empty shelves. The reader with his or her outstretched palm faces an expanding vacuum. The Holy Eucharist of the book, the secular agency of the printed word, the little temple and microcosm of the world’s knowledge and imagination is on the edge of going up in smoke. The tangible, sensual object, the technology and organizer of consciousness, argument, aspiration and acquired wisdom has been declared dead.

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama, Sunday, 10-11 PM, March 22, 2009.

There is a clarity without reason as there are reasons without clarity. There are also rhythms with neither pitch, contour nor intended pleasure. There are some who say the President has lost his rhythm. He makes multiple decisions but gets lost on the way to the reset key. Opaqe and transparent dance the two-step. If not blinded already, the eyes go blurry to the mid-section. The country - counter-polar by definition - collapses to an undefinable middle. However, don’t mention money. Even for those who still have it, no one will spend it. The clams are biting their own shells. Broken lips and edges, mushroom vendors in the market specialize in the sale of ugly trumpets.

The President two-steps to the border of ugly. Opaque or transparent he cannot trust anyone to count on a real thing. He would sing if he could, but song is a spurious assumption. He would pick up a book of poems but the pages are glued. He lives in a country of sealed, impermeable pages. What worries him most is that somebody is about to light a match. Is about to light a match and sing a dirty folksong about a local village on fire. Then another village and so on. The President keeps his Executive eye on each and every wooden fence that surround us.

It’s the fire within, not the fire without, that will profile the angels. That’s what the President tells his messaging device. His fingers tap the alphabet into a mosaic. Neither City nor town nor village is on fire unless we light and live from the fire within. That’s what he tells us. Opaque or transparent, we wander, and sometimes dance, through an array of marks and questions. Many of us pray that he knows what he’s talking about. There is no dance beyond this dance, we, for one, are continuously assured, our metal belt-buckles already in fresh sizzle.

Haptic: The First 100 Days of President Obama.
Day 60, 9-10AM, March 21, 2009, Mercey Hot Springs near Firebaugh [Fresno County, CA]

Bird songs dot, rise, fall, loop and proliferate. First day of Spring. The mating already well begun. Last night, three o’clock or so, out on the cabin porch. No moon. An extraordinary bed of stars & planets specked around the hemispheric black bed. On the edge (I am guessing) of the northeast horizon, a jarringly layered red and white striped planet (?) is an aberration among its slowly flashing white partners. An alert, an alarm, the flare of cosmic argument? Some ultimate message bearing on the local?

Mercey Hot Springs was named after the Frenchman who discovered the no doubt Indian medicine site. Merci thank you - was his real name. Much cleansed by the sulphurous waters, I thank him, too.