Corona, Corona

One way

Bike Share Corona

"50 Cents to Play"

Hide in plain sight?

Para Sol

Roosevelt Avenue, Queens. 10:20 A.M. 85 °F.

The Buddha is Always at the Wheel

P.W. far right

Philip Whalen might seem an unlikely candidate for our summer series, "Drivers Ed... For Poets." One of his best known early poems (1955-56), "Sourdough Mountain Lookout," reflect his experiences of nature, and isolation, as a fire lookout on Sauk Mountain in the North Cascades.

I always say I won't go back to the mountains
I am too old there are bugs mean mules
And pancakes every morning of the world

Along with the pancakes, bugs, mules, and fir trees come quotations from Heraclitus and the Buddha. After years of study in the U.S. and Japan, Whalen became a Zen Buddhist monk (eventually head monk of Dharma Sangha in Santa Fe.)

He returns to the experiences of mountains throughout his work. Here is the beginning of "Walking" (1965?) from Overtime: Selected Poems:

It is possible--I found out near the top of Sauk Mountain--to walk. As you lift one foot the earth turns the mountain under you, your foot comes down in a different place.

Walking is a constant in Whalen's work. But so is driving. And cars! Here is a short poem from 1963:

I
REFUSE
to be taken in
kindly stop the car
are you really sick
kindly stop the car
you're just kidding
do you want me to vomit down the back of your neck?
what's wrong?
"the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of."

And an excerpt from a longer poem called "Three Variations, All About Love" (1955):

Refuse to see me!
Don't answer the door or the telephone
Fly off in a dragon-chariot
Forget you ever knew me

But wherever you are
Is a corner of me, San Juan Letrán
Or Montreal, Brooklyn
Or the Lion Gate

Under my skin at the Potala
Behind my eyes at Benares
Far in my shoulder at Port-au-Prince
Lifted in my palm among stars

Anywhere you must be you
Drugged, drunk or mad
As old, as young, whatever you are
Living or dying the place will be me

And I alone the car that carries you away.

(The photo above comes from the This Recording blog, accompanying a piece by Whalen about becoming and being a writer. I have no idea who the other people are--or whose car it is they are leaning against!)

Rockets Red Glare

Piety Street, New Orleans

A Tendency Toward Making Do

David Antin is a poet who describes what he does this way: "I go to places ('have mind will travel') and I think in public." He tapes his talks, transcribes them, and edits them for publication. This excerpt is from a much longer piece called can we mean what we say. You can read the whole thing as it appears in Golden Handcuffs Review. (You can hear many of Antin's talk pieces on his Penn Sound page, and see some performed as well.)

back in the fifties i had a very eccentric car when i was living in 

in new york   i was living in greenwich village where things could

be stolen out from under your seat in a bus    and i had a car that was 

theft proof absolutely theft proof    it was an english four-seat 

convertible    also very aged    a sunbeam talbot    a very snappy little

car    but the mechanic who’d repaired it for the first time had installed 

the gearshift backwards so that when you shifted the car into first it 

went into reverse    only someone who knew the car would know this

so i figured anybody who tried to steal the car would be frightened 

to death    he would put the car into first and suddenly the car would

slam into the car parked in back of it and the car thief would panic and 

run away    and the car was never stolen and i never corrected the gear

shift    so you can see that my relationship to these machines was a

kind of respect for the idiosyncracies of age and a tendency toward 

             making do 

This part of the poem reminds me of the anything but theft-proof Datsun 210 wagon I had in Providence in the late 1980s and early 90s. It was stolen three times within one twelve-month period (always recovered). The first time, the thieves broke the ignition to start the car. I never bothered to get it fixed, just used a straight screwdriver, which I kept in the pocket on the driver's side door. Once, a friend and I headed out on a spring break drive to Tennessee. An hour from home, the Datsun dropped its entire exhaust system. We were lucky to find a muffler shop not too far away. As they finished each car, a mechanic would come out into the waiting room with the customer's keys. Sure enough, when the time came, the mechanic came out, held up the screwdriver, and asked, "Whose are these?"

El Camino en el Gran Concorso

Fixated Cameras

State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 at the Bronx Museum. Cars, highways, and boulevards play a big part. Some highlights:

Paul McCarthy's 25 Projected Slides from photographs taken of a single intersection in LA taken on May 1, 1971.

Gary Beydler created Pasadena Freeway Stills (1974) by photographing the road from a moving car as it drove towards and through a tunnel. He animates the trip for the viewer by holding up 1400 prints in succession in front of his white T-shirt. Not to worry, with time-elapse photography it's just about a 6 minute drive.

Even Bonnie Sherk's performance pieces, Sitting Still and Pacing (1970) have the artist sitting or pacing beside a busy street, exit ram, or bridge. Guess which one this one is from:

One that can't be reproduced here is a happening creating by Joe Hawley, Mel Henderson, and Alfred Young who arranged for many friends to hail yellow cabs and have them all converge on the same intersection in the Castro in San Francisco. The artists filmed the resulting traffic jam from street level and from a helicopter. You can see a video (of the video) here. Creedence Clearwater's "Suzie Q" provided the soundtrack.

There's a lot more to see in this fine show. And when you come out of the show, you're on the Grand Concourse!