465 miles per second; 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.091 seconds per revolution
Saturday, April 29, 2006
The Crooked places will be made straight
"The crooked places will be made straight, but the heart longs for the crooked place."-glasseye On the centennial of the 1906 SF earthquake and fire, me and Rdgz took the carshare mini cooper convertibe around town, docked the ipod and gallavanted thusly. Here we are driving down Lombard street.
Last Thursday, I decided to get to the Castro early to grab some some drinks before lining up to see the screening of Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic, with a new sountrack performed by deerhoof. As I rounded the corner at the glass coffin at about 7:30, I saw police tape blocking off the entire block of Castro between 18th and Market, a mess of cop cars and an ambulance but no flashing lights and 9 burned out cars all in a row--anyone around here still remember White night, but these weren't burned out cop cars and there was no angry mob, just people running errands or grabbing drinks, a place of commerce, a colder kind of retribution. From overheard conversations at the bars and some inquiries of onlookers, I pieced together the story: a head on collision, a gas tank exploded, gasoline leaking downhill and torching 7 parked cars in front of cliff's variety, someone in the hospital, someone dead at the scene. The Chronicle the next day claimed a southbound car, probably barreling down the hill, ran a red at Market and Castro, swerved into the wrong lane to avoid double-parked cars and ran into another car turning into the Theater parking lot.
Heaven and Earth Magic is an hour long film of animated victorian cutouts, Indian dumbell exercisers and gentleman boxers, ladies with parisols and mechanized torsos, copious cats and basalisks, the universe of a curio closet engaged in a tarantella. This was Harry Smith's alchemical cosmology, the principals of equivalent exchange: bodies and objects, life and death bartered for knowledge and power, desire the only true catalyst, an endlessly unfolding diorama of gnostic epiphanies. deerhoof live is always a revelation, the same songs never sung quite the same, the peripa-pa-pa-tetic-tic-tic drummer always adding an extra beat here and there like an adrenaline-rushed heart murmur, the singer with her breathy childlike incantations thrown into staggering cadences by the runaway beats, errant twangs, bleeps and majestically rising caterwauls, all reverborating clearly and ominously in the darkly lit cavern. This is the only music for me that could ever color the apocalypse as a joyously cataclysmic event. I would laugh and cry as the flames rose and the earth fell to the sky.
Last Saturday night, Rdgz treated me to Delfina, where I hadn't been since they first opened some 5 or 6 years ago, and didn't remember liking the food all that much, possibly because I was dining at the time with the Frenchman, who was a proffessional chef, which sometimes made me overthink what I was tasting and maybe keep me from enjoying my meal (One time he cooked me something with truffles which I mistook for fermented black bean and soy sauce). This time around I went with the slow cooked shoulder pork--thinking you can't go wrong with pork. It was fan-fucking-tastic. A sweet balsalmic sauce with caremalized onions and the oh-so-tender pork on a bed of butter soft lentils.
At the restaurant I also saw someone there I hadn't seen in over 10 years. Seated at the table next to us was one of my Quantum Mechanics Professor. It took me a while to remember his name, professor Clarke with the Oxford accent, who received a number of distinguished teaching awards and made Quantum Mechanic-- of all things--seem utterly reasonable: the world is not a continuous spectrum but quantized like the gears in a car, and the potential of things happening or not happening is the mechanism by which they happen or not. Professor Clarke was totally clear and engaging, unlike the German Professor, I had ,Prof. Mandelstrom,who had a habit of talking through the back of his head while writing illegibly on the board. That was the other thing I remember about professor Clarke was that he had impeccable penmanship, his bra's and ket's, his lowercase deltas always uniform and appealing. I wanted to tell him right there at Delfina how much I enjoyed his class, but instead I just gave him and his company pleasant, neighborly smiles.
Went and saw the new Mathhew Barney flick, Drawing Restraint 9, which screened at 11:30 pm at the SF International film festival. It was 2 and a half hours long, starred Barney and Bjork and an entire Japanese whaling fleet. It's a modern tale of love on a modern day Japanese whaling ship, as well as being an efficacious introduction to the transubstantive properties of ambergris. I've posted Barney's pre-screening introduction, where he expounds on the idea that informs most of his work:muscular hypertrophy as a procedural model for artistic creativity. (Before I went to see the movie, to put myself in the right frame of mind I went and worked out at World Gym while listening to the Bjork soundtrack.)
I quit my job, thus I need to be more frugal; I am spending money by the fistfulls. I need to get boxes so I can start packing the things I have deemed necessary for transitioning into the next chapter of my life. I need to think about next week and the week after, and the week after that and all the other weeks that we believe already exist in the having-always-already-been-cooked enchilada of space-time. I need to stop and think before I grind another handful of coffee beans. I need to make final connections with my friends before I disappear into the ether. I need to say HEY and YES OF COURSE and I KNOW I KNOW and WHEN and WHEN and EVENTUALLY. I need to stop thinking I am the boy from the Willa Cather short story Paul's Case, because I am spending my own money and all stupid and ugly things do not slide from me when I hear the serenade from Rigoletto. I need to have future prospects. I need to have hope for future prospects. I need a new perspective on things. I need to spin and dry. I need to fly cheap and safe.I need an itinerary, don't I.
