Digging in the Dirt

They’re admittedly banal, denizens of the half-hearted container gardens that decorate gas stations. Their foliage is dowdy, their stems too short to make a bouquet. They go unnoticed. To plant them is to know warm weather’s over, our northern hemisphere rolling toward the fulcrum of the winter solstice. No matter: riffling in the breeze, they will stick it out. Even after hard morning freezes heave the ground around them, pansies unfurl in the afternoon, day after pitifully short day. Their most familiar colors—purple, gold, and burgundy—seem if not martial, at least heraldic, the colors of crests or flags. In March, when the ground warms up, it’s easy enough to pull off their dead parts, rehabilitate the whole troop until they retire on Memorial Day.

How is it that their name became a slur for effeminate or gay men? Garden variety misogyny pinch hits (again!) for homophobia: while it’s now often largely unremarkable for women to aspire to reach for anything once reserved as male, the reverse is not accepted yet. The category of the feminine still functions to police masculinity. As they survive, tough as iron yet fragrant (if there are enough), pansies exhilarate; they give the lie to stereotypes about homosexuality, women, and, yes, flowers. While violas, their smaller cousins, may seem more fragile than their larger counterparts, they’re actually hardier, persistent re-seeding volunteers. In fact, although the whole botanical family isn’t suited for heat, tiny violas spring up all summer, even in the pots that simmer on a south-facing deck. Known also by the names Johnny-Jump-Up and Heartsease, they are the wild progenitors from which pansies were bred. What’s the difference between wild and weed? Outside narrowly cultivated ideas, they keep turning up. They evoke something free.

June

(May contain platitudes, pits and fragments of lassitude)

June's here and now half over. Every year I feel more like that alcoholic dude from John Cheever's story. It's not that I spend a lot of time drinking (which is good) or swimming (which is not so good), but rather that, like Neddy Merrill, I'm in a really trite spot. Time's a vehicle with disorienting speed, even moreso because some half-wit (who?) plastered the side windows & mirrors with poorly-lit and spliced fragments of memory.

Besides being fleeting, June's preposterously lush (and would be even without all those weddings and graduations and their detonating perfumes). My mind's not right, though unlike Neddy I can at least understand how fast it's all happening.

For the Glory

< On Mayday, while the Kentucky Derby took the national racing spotlight, Baltimore's Kinetic Sculpture Race offered not just the Derby's measly two minutes of colorful spectacle, outlandish chapeaux, athleticism and mud, but an entire day's worth! What's more, the Sculpture Race (sponsored by the American Visionary Art Museum) boasted not just racing excitement but an entire program of challenges, including an obstacle course, a fishing tournament, a race route that spanned both land and sea, not to mention feats of engineering and imagination. Most of all, it offered ART, and aesthetes everywhere know which of these two events deserves to be called "America's Race."

#16, my favorite entry, "Los Baltimuertos" was an exquisitely crafted horse-drawn carriage whose Day of the Dead styling paid tribute to the city's disappearing arabbers. (Double-clicking the images will enlarge them, making it possible to see in the first picture, the ingeniously improvised fringe on the female pilot's sombrero--yes, they are tampons--and in the second, the hitchhiking seagull peering beneath the canopy as Los Baltimuertos navigates the harbor).

Most spectacularly, many of the sculptures' pilots completed these challenges in costume, and the scupltures are invariably bike-powered (no motors allowed). That's on the city streets, in mud, sand, uphill, and in the waters of Baltimore's harbor (paddles are permitted in the water). The kinetinaut at right, one of the pilots of AVAM's own entry, "Fifi Joins the Circus" (#21) can be seen in our video coverage actually sprinting in these awesome boots (and a cool-looking wig). Many thanks to Paul Bradshaw (Happy Anniversary, Hon: 5/5/10=14 years!) for all race photography and video.



In other highlights, Platypus (#24, Personal Long-range All-Terrain Yacht Proven Un-Safe) was awarded best pit crew for freeing the maiden from her chains in the Patterson Park Fountain. Those are rubber duckies at the edge of the fountain (part of the fishing contest).
Platypus, whose special features include drums and a barbecue grill, is seen in the second image passing the Patterson Park Pagoda.

Honors for Sock Creature of the Universe (sock puppets are required equipment for all entrants) were taken by Chessie (#6).



More about Baltimore's Kinetic Sculpture race, including wonderful photographs, helpful advice for building your own entry, official race rules, and a complete tally of winners (past and present) can be found at Tom Jones' excellent website KineticBaltimore.com. Plenty of inspiration for those who wish to go for the glory. Next year's race is slated for May 7.

The Pacific Vortex is not the Afterlife

"If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle."
--Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (via othervoices.org)


By now I suppose most everyone has seen this. Werner Herzog is Plastic Bag. Ramin Bahrani's lyrical film addresses humanity's relation to the material world by creating an actual relationship between Herzog's eponymous bag and his female owner (she dumps him halfway through the story; he moves on).

Ever since they first appeared (so long ago now), the bags have seemed an apt figure for human estrangement not just from nature, but from the world more broadly (just where, initially, were those things supposed to go?). So I was glad to see the bag voyage to the Pacific Vortex, that immense gyre of plastic garbage floating for miles in the Pacific Ocean (there are actually several, and not just in the Pacific, as it turns out).

I often think about the Vortex, and I'm convinced that if people were forced to look at pictures of it (perhaps at the point of sale) being mindful might come more easily. It's harder than you think; some residents of DC were so reportedly so incensed about the new 5 cent bag surcharge this winter that they vowed to shop in Virginia, that fabulous frontier where bags range freely and don't cost a red cent. (Take that, planet Earth!)

Of course, nobody's likely to make a film about a plastic tampon applicator, but they are just as eternal/infernal; I suppose they're just one of an entire karmic class of personal care flotsam. I used to see them every winter among the seawrack when I walked the beach at Ocean City, or Assateague, or Fenwick Island. Actually, tampon applicators are far worse than plastic bags, simply because we must not indicate that we even see them: they're about LADYPARTS, unmentionable even in commercials for feminine hygiene.

Stardust revealed by Hubble Telescope

Source: Hubblesite.org


From the HubbleSite NewsCenter:

"This brand new Hubble photo is of a small portion of one of the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. The scene is reminiscent of Hubble's classic "Pillars of Creation" photo from 1995, but is even more striking in appearance. The image captures the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being pushed apart from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks like arrows sailing through the air."


Our world sometimes seems so snarky and small ("hey--that looks like the liner from a Yes album"). Yet these images make me lightheaded; I have no words with which to name what they inspire. My hands fall motionless on the keyboard, as if this were some sort of meditation. Indeed, at no other time do I find it so natural to be absolutely still. It's as close as I have come for many years to anything approaching religion.

Prolegomena to Any Future Anything*

While elegance is refusal, this blog commends instead the exultance of acceptance, the radical acceptance even of what might look like refuse. Trashadelica: because I’ve washed up on an isolated shore under my own uncertain navigation. Trashadelica: the aesthetic of a solitary bricoleur, the perspective from an invisible academic atoll, an ethos of well-intentioned liminality.

Trashadelica: the surprise in the cadavre exquis, not to mention the recycled cadaver; for more on the latter, see Mary Roach’s awesome book Stiff, a sincere survey of the heroic, surprisingly varied careers of dead bodies. Trashadelica forages (what is psiloscybin but repurposed poisoning?) and reveres frugality: lichens can live on rocks, and nothing on earth is more beautiful, or makes more out of less.

Trashadelica exults not in debris per se, but in heterogeneity, hybridity: what comes in over the transom, since everything’s dust anyway, “star stuff,” to quote Carl Sagan. But before its atoms are rearranged some stuff might turn up at Value Village, where one can find both staph infections and the stray Limoges box. Trashadelica is sometimes trashed, because, as Rimbaud knew, there is much to be found in the disordering of the senses, though my stance is more humble.

Trashadelica: most of all because I admit defeat at trying to divine any grand literary purpose, the salvation of some ecriture feminine or even a single genre, let alone a verifiable trajectory for autobiography. I’m closing in on a half-century, after all, so better late than never, with a shout-out to Ken Macrorie: it is right to give him thanks and praise. Trashadelica: candygrams from my brain (inestimable gratitude to you, John Jacob, for that line and so much else).

Trashadelica: it’s not in the OED. But here’s what I did find: –delic (2nd ½ of psychedelic), from the Greek, deloun: to make manifest, reveal. As for the word trash itself: origins fittingly unknown. “1. A thing of little or no value; worthless or poor quality stuff, esp. literature; rubbish….” Okay. So what's in there? And what else?

*I freely admit to stealing this title from the late Ellen Kreitler, who was brilliant, who had read Kant and everything else (I have not), and whose Prolegomena I read at VCU in the 1980's (when the mainframe--hey, UNIX for People!--was newly installed in the Hibbs building and no one dreamed of actually charging to print a document). Sic transit gloria mundi.