The Zooffice Episode 10: Napping!

In Telling

An old Cherokee was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said, “A battle is raging inside me - it is a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”
The old man looked at the children with a firm stare. “This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too.”
They thought about it for a minute, and then one child asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee replied: “The one you feed.”

Staging

So I never wrote a letter when I told everyone I would.
I had nothing to say then and nothing now.

I breathe vapour, pouring into the air, lifting, pirouetting; it's a thread
-a narrative read to her, body reposed, pillowed head,
lying down later in bed. Later now isn't later dead, it's before then.

I had hoped that you would write my letters, read them to me and
to my friends; handle my voice, my sound like a dust that travels
along highways of wind, zephyr whirlpool, you the ultimate listener.

The congregation of sound: letters read upon a silver salver, dipped
in dramatic timbre rose above the sheets they dove under before.
Lifted her legs like the crescent points of that cheesy moon, flakes
before the bedsheets, before there came my voice echoed in pencil.

Lines and lines. Lines and lines more. Lines and lines some more.

So I never wrote a letter when I told myself I would.
I had nothing to say then and nothing now.

The Zooffice Episode 9: Thanksgiving Feast

It's Your Ride

I, could have known, really had the chance, expected it to come
falling down, the entire cliff side -that you were more than imaginable,
unrestrained, brazen, a real high-on-life bride.

Just let me know where you've been, I'm not asking to touch me or don't,
just let me know where you've been.
We can leave it alone, I'm sure there's someone
who knows where you've been.

But it looks like I won't be around, fixed fire burns my feet
alive, (as they were) imagine what it'll do to my heart
and half-dead mind. The boys, they bury, inhume the radicals with time.
The boys,
they bury,
inhume t
he
ra
dica
ls with ti
me.
Th
e bo
ys, th
ey b
ury, inh
ume the
 radic
als wi
th time.

Hearts Tell a Different Story

Firetruck, race car, limousine, convertible,

vacated sheath, muscle car, cop car, ramps,

a cardboard box, books, and broken axels,

spare tires, a steel toe, and the miserable.

A knife to hollow out a soul,

to cut a face with, to stab a heart.

A knife to uncover the missing

selves we only knew in part.

Uncertainty, hands upon their cold metal,

wheels atop the ground, rolling deeply

against an even bitter kitchen floor,

a clutch, neck tie, collar, ominous mettle.

A knife to hollow out a hole,

from whole and not yet all apart.

A knife to recover from abreast,

a cranium, darkly wedged leather dart.

Wails, groans, shrieks and screams,

palms raised, waving away disbelief

like a magical wand -maybe magic

will make its return -degenerate peace.

The Zooffice Episode 8: Occupy Zooffice

The Illustrator's Self Portrait

I was never good at drawing.
So I decided to speak. And I opened my mouth about things my imagination would bring: like Tyrannosaurs rampaging through Sierra Avenue and Barbee Street, or floating cities on the verge of demolition due to diabolical frenzy. And well... sometimes we don't have things. And sometimes we do. You see, a mind is an immeasurable tool -not to be confused with moments we're confused with ourselves by others who like to confuse. Really, I could draw whatever I desired -inside of my head. And when I would rest it on my pillow in bed I would remap the world as it lay this way or that. That-away and through all those colorful maps where more than just cruise ships cruise. And where bruised egos return to their drawing boards and bruise some more over liquor and booze. But then again, there wasn't anyone around to distort my imagination or my imaginary creations. And my asphyxiation wasn't abomination, it was just pure relation. And if I could, I would create it, but I can't, so I think it. I say it. But sometimes we don't have things like I said before. Nothing to label us as who we are, so we become our actions, our daily chores. Some become freeze tag, others become hop-scotch. A kid I teach is slowly becoming a shadow bozer waiting for the right uppercut. The other day, I lectured about math and geography, so the boy sitting in front of me is now becoming his parents' gardener and eventually? -Cosmology.

And there's this girl in the corner who always completes her homework -she's becoming a lawyer I tell her. She'll become an information technology consultant, a doctor, practitioner, or an architectural engineer, hell... But she corrected me when I asked her. She said that she's just working on being herself.

The Zooffice: Episode 7 Happy Halloween!

Cultural Sensitivity and Dilemma

"We should try to be precise about the source of our frustrations.
Some of our trials are new, the result of our new environment
and changed circumstances, and may require original solutions.
But many others are simply old trials turning up in a new place.
As such, we already know what to do about them (i.e., the same
thing we did the last time), provided, that is, we identify them
for what they are. On the whole, life doesn't pose that many
dilemmas; it merely recycles the same ones in new packaging."

-From The Art of Crossing Cultures by Craig Storti

The Zooffice Episode 6: Animal Crackers

The Way in Which Each Sees the Other Confirms His Own View of Himself

Approaching portrait photography essentially makes me feel like this photograph. Or should I say, that attempting to portrait as a photographer makes me feel as though I were hanging at Annie Leibovitz's feet in this photograph above the many skyscrapers in New York City, New York. If only I could expand the sensation of flight as I begin shooting my subjects, inquiring about their days, touching their hands and moving their arms and legs around so that the lighting lies upon their clothing ever so delicately.

And I may ask myself: what about taking a photograph makes me feel as if I were inside another? It's simple. To lead in developing a specific moment of place and time, which has been the absolute end of photography, may also be found in the overwhelming vertigo that I may absorb as I peer over the edge of a gargoyle stone, realizing the effects of height and heft. And pull. Thrust may be more like it, but whichever be be truest, I understand that the relationship between subject and artist is a myriad of complexities. Dependent upon my intention, the shoot may be directed towards a moment of solemnity, though it need not be specifically that. If I were to photograph for fashion, art, expression, impression, or even competition, the shoot would much feel like the photograph generated. It is an act. Nearly a tightrope act, which would help suspend the drama in the photograph pictured above. Here in lies the spectacle of my metaphor: what is the intention of the photograph picturing Annie Leibovitz atop the Chrysler building in New York City, New York? Does John Loengard present a behind-the-lens portrait of a photographer so willing to achieve a shot that she'll climb one of the tallest buildings in all of New York? Where are the implications of that message? And what does it suggest for all photographers as a whole? And why Annie Leibovitz?

Here, Loengard blends the line between artistic portrait photography and documentary photography by including Annie Leibovitz taking part in the work that she presumably not only loves, but lives from. One of the ultimate portrait photographs, one does not get much more unconventional than this, yet conventionality is another argument altogether. 

The Zooffice Episode 5: Cup it Up!

A Few Words on Photography

"Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and our furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling." 
-Walter Benjamin from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

With this same attitude -that our offices, our means of daily transportation and current fiscal responsibilities, have locked us up, hopelessly, there are degrees of self understanding that a person may need to travel through (pardon the pun) in order to perceive their self in relation to those creations around them. In the age of mechanical reproduction, we have rapidly become the age of digital reproduction. And in that age, the work of art has lost nearly all of its value as reproduction has even itself become a thing of the past. This new age lays out paths to imagery in abundance, paintings as obtrusive and permeating throughout computer screens, television sets, and banners that plague the highways. Commodified, art's history of exploitation does not peak at any particular point. Accessibility does. And accessibility may or may not be peaking at this very moment. For what is not accessible, really? Does it truly matter that my neighbor have the original Robert Frank photographic print, framed on his wall, and I the copy? Who will care? And at what point does value trump aura, atmosphere, initial response, or reaction? As long as we are liars, we will print and pretend that copies are in fact the original piece, and as long as we lie to ourselves, authenticity will not matter, though some would like to believe otherwise. Authenticity is what, anyways, besides vomit in the gutter at 3am in the morning. Talk about abstract.

The Zooffice Episode 4: Hard at Hearing

The Goose Who Thinks She's a Sandhill Crane

I may have a red mind about green habits -but then again,
I could have wings strewn about my hips, and have stood
inside the marsh until the rising tide drowns all the rabbits.

And this post will be part thinking, part screaming.
Part screaming only due to the fact that I have begun
to loose control over my interior temperament. Tantrum

They call it, but I've noticed that "they" call "it" many
"things". Like like like like like like like like like like
carnations, and blueberry muffins under melting butter.

The Sandhill Crane I call it. Like I see it, I say, and I
call it like they see it, I say. I say, they call it like they
see the I see the it. The "I" sees the "it" it doesn't, does it?

Triplets, like droplets, but meters of musicality. Musica
syllabically measures the movement in your palm,
as does slipping it into your pants, palm side down.

And the most fascinating aspect ratio doesn't form from
a y and an x, though the primate mammal would and
should differ there. Right there, now, in high definition.

At 8:54 post meridian the wolverines throw down their
garments and dance about the woods in carnival violence.
All there is, will never be, and nothing will, always.

I may have a violet mind, though not a violent mind indeed.
-but then again, the Sandhill Crane, bleeding from
her mouth, smiles still at the sun and her own opportunity.

Zooffice! Episode 3: The Freudian Slip

Brush Stroke

With the way your bangs roll down, you could shade the way land lies from the sun at its solstice.

And it's summer we're talking about. Unequal, equally unreal lives

lodged inside brown brazen eyes (and lids to match) run wild, horses wild.

Run while it's light out or run while around you is darkened. About the wind, your face,

zoysia freckled about you, hearken go the leaves, lightly tiptoeing

the sky. Summertime is slipping into the rough.

Run wild horses, run.

The Zooffice Episode 2: The Refrigerator Scandal

The Deepest Core

In pieces, I cup my hands around
remnants of a character I once.
Knew how to illustrate.
Illustriate...
Or what I mean to say,
is embellish in arms
of thousands of diamonds,
marked by a number, resembling quality of stone.
And the further I go, the more I uncover what
has already been there: that precious
isn't as precious as it once seemed to be.
Devilish and desirous doesn't do it justice.
Secrets are more like it.
Whether it be from holding tongue,
or moving it around on the inside of
another mouth,
mining will lead to the center,
yet I have heard that it is quite dark there.
In the deepest core.

Zoffice Drops!

Zooffice!

Bench Gazing

All is lost in a Tuesday night sky. Overhead, a tree hanging over. It will be little time until I do the same. In twenty years nouns change, don't they. Their meanings change, their spelling.. changes. In twenty years I will hope to have understood at least a handful of their purposes.

Los Angeles, CA

I Cannot Indicate It

What I meant to say was forever.
Because that's the truth of everything I encounter.
And how long would you like to stay with
the company? Forever, sir. Nod my head
and collect the script from the table
that I shuffled twice, hoping he would not
notice. Maybe I'm becoming unnoticed.
And maybe I've become more noticeable
than I would have liked to become.
These days have slowed, the hours
like bells, tolled against my ship-sunken
skull. Time, you are my natural enemy.
The longer I wait for you to pass,
the dial turns over to eternity, and
I always seem to let my chances slip away.

All Signs Reveal Us

And sighs are
sunken logs across the
St. Louis river.
And the swinging
bridge begs for mercy:
each step a misery of choice.
Life is too complex a noun,
but we toss it around anyway:
altogether rejoiced,
expending the image
for the sign -life,
like a branch, an apple
or trout's swim, unsatisfied.

There Are Movies (Thinking)

After watching what could possibly be one of the best films I have ever watched in The Tree of Life, I left paralyzed at what I witnessed. Albeit, I intermittently nodded off during the films final segments, I couldn't help but rejoice in the pornographic sensation I encountered while watching. If movies could shed their clothing -and believe me, they can- then The Tree of Life bares all. I'm certain that everyone in the theater, all but seven or so UC Irvine college students on summer break, felt as though they had just watched a family endure strenuous chances -those that potentially come to demolish an entire household- from outside a living room window, peeping in. Contrite, maybe. Pleasurable, definitely. And yet while I endeavored to translate the whispers emitted by the films central character, Jack, I couldn't help but feel exposed just as he.

But why do I feel this way? Does being exposed make you a more rounded person, a more complete human being? In committing mischievous acts, and disobeying his parents, Jack grinds hard against the fundamental construction of the American Family, which is what Bradd Pitt's character attempts to create. But sons are not created to follow their fathers, or at least in Western Culture, they tend to follow another path. The Mother's passive allegiance to her children reflects what love exists in the family continuity. Yet love is not continuous. And the perpetual feeling that destruction will exist at some point and is equally inevitable in the Earth's life, let alone human life, I and presumably those others in the theater watching the movie, feel as though all was for nought.... or at least to misunderstand a little bit more of this life.

Elephant's Matter

flaccid hoary 

skin -gunmetal

would have

been a play

on words, of

words would

have made it

theater.

Cartoons

Macerating Lemons

Words have failed, writings have failed, and seeing failed,

along with other failures: thinking, swearing, screaming,

breathing...

all have failed beautifully.

It's history razored out of the rind.

And although the water wells have run dry,

there persists in the scant, dusking sunlight,

a pale labelled, 

indistinctly,

"for the heart, another time".

Not Unique in Trying to Be

What is it we find in the end
that hasn't approached us so?
The crashing waves
at our vessel's hull
(china bowls skating from their decorated spots),
pounding hearts into pounding.
Fathers need tell
their sons to never stroll
in the corralling
flame by their lonesome.

Clack

Some things just sound pretty.

When Colors Wane (Return Again)

For a while now I had the suspicion that I'd fade away like the simplest memory. That at the end of a day sometime in the near future, I would become the diminishing recollection of a grandson I could not influence. It was almost too easy for me to consider my future, and to think back on my childhood youth, and all but realize that I could not return. I sense that few of us understand our departure from the naive imagination, however immature it was, and however misunderstood we were. We can never go back. I can never go back. And I'd argue that some of us feel that way: that we could return sometime in the next fifty years to those moments when we were twelve, passing the ball across the black top, running wildly into the grass, cartwheeling over clover patches, and digging around inside our desks, grabbing at objects that would allow our minds to wander away from what our teachers lectured about. But, no matter, I will awake tomorrow with the same misunderstanding: that I will become a child again, and that I will not fall apart like all things, and that when I ponder the empty spaces left on this earth, there will be something to fill them with architecture, with love, passion, propriety, fullness, and color.

From Dawn to Dust

I couldn't repair the world if I tried.

The foundations of fountains, forests,
-bridges suspended over bottomless
rivers. Those bodies like their own
suspension over cushions and pillows.
Soft things don't crumble like the hard.

And it's the hardest part,
and it's crumbling, the world in need
of repair.

O, where is the repairman?
Can anyone find him, to fix this mess.

Scoop with your hands boy! Collect
all you can, place it aside and scoop
some more!

But all the boy said,
"I couldn't collect all this dust if I tried."

And at that moment, something in
the molten core of the earth had vanished,
died.

Erosion at the Earth's Edge

Last time I lost my head.
Last time
I convinced my gray
glowing chest,
it's heartlessness,
and balance of mind,
that there rested a role for
creating an our,
and
those personas could
climb the partitions
we mapped out
without each other knowing.
When we were young,
and did things.
Last time
I lost my qualm,
but I continued
to rest under
your hand-made quilt,
and dream big dreams,
important dreams that carried
our spoken lines
onto faraway lands,
and cliffs that disappeared
with the ocean's ebb
like Orion's appropriation.

A Jawbone for You, And For Me, a Ribcage

Poetry is everywhere. And no, that’s not the most original line anyone has ever written, but it makes perfect truth out of blindness and illiteracy. We are not illiterate in the sense of reading and writing, but in the visual world of imagery. Can one truly argue the cause for those elements they notice in a photograph? Are they capable of reasoning why the next mountains shot in Yosemite will not demonstrate a perfect snow cover? And what about the portraits of Leibovitz? Of Avedon? Steiglitz? O, red wheelbarrow, where are you now. And when a picture fades into the past, does it fade from memory as moments drift away like leaflets of a maple? Or do they stagger to the ground like those shredded eucalyptus? And when all of those images settle into a cove, bones from deer, antlers and all will we bury them more? On the side of highways and roads that lead to nowhere, will those who will treat what our past has accomplished, dissatisfied with our effort to preserve theirs, disregard our belongings, and leave it be? Or will they brush off the earthenware instruments, listen to each one-thousand words, and bring about the change we so wished to seek in ourselves yet were too distracted by the simplicity of light to make..

Discovery

I need to discover something new.
Something worth discovering, or rediscovering I should say.
There's a place where my inspiration resides and it's not here in this house
where the pain of coming home rides away the joy
and exasperation of a bountiful pen, and instead, blends a
new anger inside a bottle or glass -and no I'm not describing alcoholism.
Dissatisfaction; directed at Langston Hughes, John Ashberry,
An d all of the mislead minds that taught a writ er
what it means to write, a think er what it means to think,
a bod y what it means to be.
Like discovering a lang uage disappearing
in the middle of Act 3, it's all hearkening, really.
And I need to discov er some thing new. Really new-really.

Pistol

A mainstream being of a timely culture with the likes of black, bare-blown vultures circling a plane of sky, flying higher than a natural high, clawing at scalps, and branches, and what appeared as ropes, lassoing aerials, wrenching them down, they them and their hopes like a prolific stream of ideas dragged into a trap for fools, furrowing, helplessly, humiliated it seemed, below. O, how I bargained for a different setting, but was forced out, watched, spectated merely, empty-handed and wholehearted.

Anthropology Lecture Notes

"Geography of imagination."-transformation in the savage and the study of the "other".
-Passing of the savage: light of great cultural problems moving away from focus of study, unanswerable to our own culture. The suffering subject replaces the savage.... ...suffering slot...
Waiting for Godot relationship...
Side comment::: "well wived"::::
-Rise of the NGO as a new humanitarianism movement focused on suffering savages.
Studying the suffering lead to releasing of pressure from the anthropology community because suffering was universal and not attributed to solely to savages or the "others".
:::Traumatic suffering beyond culture? -accounts of trauma felt inside our bodies as we recall specific moments..
"Growing interest in empathy.." a new form of humanitarianism..
Side comment:::"When anthropology happens in general.."::: ....peculiar line...

Painting of a Boy Sailing a Toy Ship

Those trees take years to grow.
Don't you know that you are only a projection of light?
A refraction or bending of the image inside of my
childlike mind.
And I am much younger than those sails will last.
Will they see an ocean? The most musical one at that?
::Pacific, Indian, Atlantic, Antarctic:: sounds like
a cathartic exploration, young boy playing with perhaps
his only toy.
And what of balloons?
Oh, the places they'll take you. Oh, the places you'll go!
Oh, whichever ocean your river will lead you, be sure to
greet those new friends with
a wide open hello!

Draft

It should be like talking, but it isn’t at all. If I could conjure up all of the anecdotal language I think of long enough to put onto paper, I’d have a novel by now. But I don’t and I seem to care less and less about any of it; the writing takes too long, the researching only happens on the internet at night when my parents are sleeping. My job doesn’t pay enough and there is a perpetual feeling that it never will, and that one day, on top of all my yearning for action, for an ounce of freedom to stamp my feet where others have stamped before me, I’ll have begun to transfigure into dust. I suppose it’s not so bad, now considering that everyone will turn to that carbon-ous ash: C. The first letter of my name, as well as for one of the women I have pleasured in bed. At least it seemed that way to me then. And with the way my thoughts are progressing, I am only spending my final drowsy hours of March 30, 2011 spelling out nonsensical memories. But what if memories could be made into fabric, like the quilt blanket. What a beautiful idea, if there be any, to capture those unique moments in a person’s life, then to stitch them in a fabric and wrap it around your body while you sleep at night. Some people will go to any length to preserve their memory. It’s what defines them, I suppose.

View From the Roof

Gunshots

War broke out and I dropped my camera.
It managed to photograph this man's fear.
Unlike a gesture held, this was split second.
Indescribable, really, I could not depict.
But the camera, and its fractured lens,
                                                         did.

In Search of Something New

I find myself in my reflection, the selfless disappearance of the self. For weeks my thoughts sat on a shelf, recollections of times when I was played with. Toys are not the same as they once were. Their parts are more complex. Worthless or instead maybe, full of worth.

Die Out

When I'm gone,

you'll never know the difference.

There will be clouds overcasting the hills of a crowded
desert landscape and valleys involving
houses.

There will be tortoises.

There will be canvas.

There will be grains displaced as oceans
dash across higher plains,

collapsing,
twisting sound.

There will be difference in the world, but a world of
difference?

No.

Not Philosophers, but Fretsawyers

In tragedy, a grin, though formed upon the upturned face of the tuxedo-ed dragon, reverberates like a firestorm, not optimistically, shining like the serrated edges of an elongated blade ran between the tree's fibered soul.

The Darkest Coffee Smells the Sweetest

Although he spoke it, I don't believe it to be true.
Auden's picnic, where his downlying gentleman broke his bread and drank wine with a flash of light overhead and unheard: a distance undervalued.

The rain began tapping on top of the hazel wood milk like a kaffeeklatsch and
barking dogs: the Labrador. O, the Labrador.

The Duke

It doesn't mean a thing, really.
Those Merlot stained glasses, tilting.
The tracing of a protractor
around its plastic frame, numbers
and senseless numbers smashed
into degrees of the leaf
after it has fallen from the tree.

Shamrocks grouped together in
a green puddle the boy laid inside
when he was eight, care-freed
and free to care::
about anything, really. It doesn't
matter now that holes have been dug,
and inside those wholes dug out,
each body seeded the same way.

The world swung around
the sun on the 2's and 4's.
And as its audience snapped
their fingers on, well.. the 1's and 3's,
martini's were filled in orderly fashion
by those fashionably dressed.
The piano asked for ice, and
would you believe a thousand waitresses?

Page 178 Portrait

"Cranly of all the tumults and unrest and longings in his soul, day after day and night by night, only to be answered by his friend's listening silence, would have told himself that it was the face of a guilty priest who heard confessions of those whom he had not power to absolve but that he felt again in memory the gaze of its dark womanish eyes.

Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friend's listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shriveled up, sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms."

J. Joyce -from Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man

Nobody Ever Belittled the Bird's Song

All across the black, universe, a vast summer wind passes between Alnath and Capella. Auriga shivers in breezing dust, blown-back by an exploding astrological sign. It's falling apart you know.
Limbs quicksilver made while the sun's back was turned, fast. And that your constant gaze burned a lot like ash formed from a burning hole in the ground, its bodies gleamed in bruising radiance, the sound oppressed a dozen or so leaves. Could they have smiled? stagnancy. optimism. desire. defiance. rampancy. Wind is a depression that brushes your cheek and teases your tongue. And a dead bird is a just a bird, with that same wind at its back, quiet and content.

Photography

A representation of a hill somewhere in Alta Loma, California,
portraying the wild flower in all of its Aureolin brilliance,

:::It is smashed:::

Upon
the red clay, and muddied.