Living Color

The brother escaping an inscrutable installation; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.

Frankenstorm(king)'s Monster

I passed the hurricane quite comfortably in relatively untouched Philly, so I have no photos of dramatic destruction and the raw power of nature, hubris of man and his works, etc.  Instead, here is a view of Zhang Huan's "Three-Legged Buddha" at the Storm King Art Center.

'Sworthy

The Andy Goldsworthy wall, Storm King Art Center, a fall day.

Monolith

Cue the monkeys.

It Tolls for Thee

And now a switch to western funeral traditions- this melancholy, beckoning angel tops a grave in the Woodland Cemetery near my house.  Its quite old, full of stately family plots, beautifully landscaped and my favorite place in the neighborhood to run.  This was taken at dusk a few days after an early-winter snow.

Sacrifice

Looking from the winding stairs to the facade of the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona.

(Not really very) Bokehlicious

Yes, it's a very shallow depth of field, but it ain't bokeh to write home about.

Daintily-etched characters on a sandstone wall, in southern China.

Little Buddha

A carving from Baodingshan, in China.  I unfortunately can't remember which wall I found this little guy on, and there's not enough to reference in the background for a cross-check on the interwebs.  But judging by his blissfully devotional countenance, I think he is not, for example, from the section of the relief which depicts the "Hells of Excrement and Impaling."

Sherpa Craft, Two

The Om Mani Padme carved into a defunct yak horn, near Khumjung.

Sherpa Craft, One

A Buddhist ceremonial horn, found in the Sherwi Khangba Sherpa Culture Museum above Namche Bazaar.

Angular Light

Shadowplay in the I.M. Pei-designed (as though you couldn't tell) exhibition hall, of the Deutsches Historiches Museum in Berlin.  I am a firm believer in letting light do the heavy lifting when it comes to architecture- it lends a dynamic, organic quality; a sense of slow, dignified movement within what would otherwise seem (to us mortals) an almost eternal monolith.  And Pei was a master.

Apparently he would only agree to design a small building integrated into the existing museum, as he did not want to distract from the surrounding architecture.

Helping Hands

The thousand-armed Avalokitesvara, or Guanyin in Chinese, the mythological Bodhisattva of Compassion who requested and received 1,000 hands in order to save all sentient life.  Baodingshan, near Dazu, China.

All the World's a Stage

Performance of traditional Chinese theater, Xi'an.  Can't for the life of me remember the story (it was one of many), but I do remember that it was beautifully staged and that the accompanying dinner involved more varieties of dumpling than I thought possible.

In the spotlight

A room of statuary, deserted but for the guard.  Not sure what museum this is in- the Met?  The PMA?

Balls.

Apparently I'm still feeling abstract.  Defunct fountain + public art, Girona, Spain.

Stone Idol

Swayambhunath, Kathmandu, Nepal.

Cryptid

Abstract statuary, somewhere in Hong Kong.

Screaming across the sky

In that last post about Gravity's Rainbow, I mentioned little meerkats of brilliance poking their heads out of the subterranean warren of symbolism and digression that make up the bulk of the 900 pages.  One of these shining rodents of authorship is the longest episode in the novel (no chapters, here we have "episodes"), and is almost a stand-alone short story.  It focuses on a character, Franz Pokler, who had been mentioned maybe once before, and the history of his involvement with developing the dreaded 00000 Schwarzgerat as the holocaust occurs in the background.  I know that's just blahblah to those who haven't read this book.  I won't really try to describe the plot, but it's a case where all of the oblique symbolism and allegory and general verbosity of Pynchon come together into a story that is both thought-provoking and poignant without being heavy-handed (how many short stories about the holocaust can say that?).  It's by turns amusing and horrifying and ends in great sadness.  In the simplest terms, its about the manufacture and manipulation of innocence.


The picture is from the holocaust memorial in Berlin- relevant!

Taste the 'Rainbow'

It's a bird!  It's a plane!  Fuck, it's a V2 rocket!

Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s opus and my determined literary slog for about the last four months, finally completed last week.

For those that are unfamiliar, here is a handy equation:

Gravity’s Rainbow =

Catch-22(Dhalgren x Ulysses)^hardcore pornography
William S. Burroughs + Kafka

It is nearly 900 pages. There are over 400 named characters, many of whom appear only once, while others might be introduced early and then left for hundreds of pages, only to become integral near the close. Dozens of distinct voices providing narration. Whiplash-inducing tonality changes; from technical engineering or mathematical discussion, to philosophical digressions, to mythology/analogy, to horror, to comedy, to some truly hardcore, straight-up porn, and back again.  It encompasses an enormous pile of themes- free will vs destiny (celestial/divine and man-made), Pavlovian conditioning (sexually murderous octopi!), science and the limits of human control, sacrifice, psychology, extinction, sexuality and transgression, paranoia, insanity and self, obsession, mythical pig-heroes, immortal light-bulbs, kazoos...

The narrative of the main character, such as it was, ended over 100 pages before the novel did. Those last 100 pages provide total disintegration of plot, character, structure, hell, reality and the English language (I will grant you that these two things are not unrelated- those last 100 pages reflect the complete dissolution of that main character, among other things). The climactic action to which the main plotline was building is presumed to occur beyond the final page. Or not.

I will admit that this was at times an infuriating slog. However, however. Frequently you emerge from an eye-crossing passage of stream-of-consciousness or technical digression into episodes of pure brilliance. Laugh-out-loud screwball comedies, thrilling action pieces, beautiful instances of poignancy, bizarre wtf essays that still manage to be enthralling…and yes, some of those sex scenes were pretty damn titillating. 

I can’t even imagine what its editors thought when they read this thing- where even to begin? The consensus is that 99% of the original manuscript ended up published. Reviews were decidedly mixed. The Pullitzer fiction committee recommended it unanimously, but the full selection board opted instead to award it to…nobody. But there was also fervent praise like this, from the NYT’s reviewer: "If I were banished to the moon tomorrow and could take only five books along, this would have to be one of them."

Um…no. But I'm glad I read it.

Downward Spiral

 Two stairwells in the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, Barcelona.