All posts by jeffrey hannan

On Sundays we walk in a circle

[An incidental homage to Daniel Alarcon’s “At Night We Walk in Circles” with indebtedness to  “The Gift“, by Lewis Hyde.]


On Sundays we’ve taken to going for walks in the morning to get the blood flowing and perhaps, to put it one way, transition from the perennial work hangover that is Saturday into the downward work spiral known as Sunday.

Or said optimistically: To flush the beautiful lethargy of sleep from our systems. To stay connected to ourselves and this place. To shake the coma that is technology.

States St, SF

States St, SF – Dec 2014

This morning, just at the beginning of dawn, a pink razor clamshell appeared in the sky. Far above bedroom windows across Potrero and the Bay, the sun struggled to rise from behind a nimbostratus veil. Other than the slow changing of the sky from a shade of charcoal to a shade of light grey, this faint rose-colored band was the only indicator that daylight was approaching.

corona-heights-house-w-3-lights

Corona Heights – Dec 2014

We donned our tennis shoes and ventured out to seek the new day from atop Corona Heights, that Mars-like clump of rock and dirt that juts up into the City’s airspace like an alien child of Twin Peaks.

corona-heights-w-light

Corona Heights – Dec 2014

On the perimeter of the park three police cruisers sat parked outside a house, their flashing red lights casting echoing strobes into the  mist. From the summit came the  voices of  young people, their pre-dawn gathering a likely after-party for their Saturday night.

Corona Heights - Dec 2014

Corona Heights – Dec 2014

The large field at the entrance to the park was muddy and wet. Its interior is covered in broken bark that the City puts there because the place will grow no grass; the mulch was lightly swimming this morning because of the recent rain. The eucalyptus that line the border along Randall Museum Road drop their leaves and seedlets with abandon, creating an additional soggy brine: one less road to follow.

We climbed two hundred feet from base of the park along an easy path that rings the hill and apexes just below the summit. Karl the Fog was sound asleep atop Corona Heights, crowning its peak with a heavy brume. As a result, the sunrise was illusory, the event itself elusive in the drench of fog.

corona-heights-arvin-fog

Corona Heights – Dec 2014

“contending and reckoning”

The week began for me with an ill-timed trip to the airport on Monday evening. Rush hour. In the rain. Dark skies and slick, glistening streets choked with cars. It cast a sullen mood over the entire week: the barely moving red-tinted traffic served as visual metaphor for the lethargic flow of blood in my body; the horns and aggravation from poorly timed stoplights mimicked the discordant  symphony of frustration in my brain.

The foul mood came on the heels of reading Daniel Alarcón’s “At Night We Walk in Circles” on the plane ride to and from Virginia, which is where we spent a fine Thanksgiving holiday. It overlapped with my reading of “The Gift”, by Lewis Hyde, a well-known book about creativity and the artist in the modern world.

The timing of this mood shift was ill-conceived although admittedly serendipitous. My foul mood arrived at the onset of the holidays, that transitional period between the fat binge of Thanksgiving and the glittery verve of Christmas when generally I’m at ease, easy-going…Lately, the pessimists have been doing a tiny dance upon my shoulders, whispering sadistic little ditties into my ear as if to thwart my attention. It’s perfect timing to call into question one’s true intentions.

The former of the two serendipitous book finds – Alarcón’s fine, fine, excellently crafted and linguistically tasty novel – was inspirational and entertaining. The latter – Lewis Hyde’s heavy handed yet revelatory delving into Walt Whitman as an artistic sage (a true democratic beacon of the creative gift) as part of his  larger argument of art as a gift that is both intrinsic and must be shared if it is to thrive – was at first exhausting. Then, once I’d sat myself down to lunch and abandoned all the rest of life and gave myself permission to simply read, it left me nourished in the mind although feeling somewhat deficient in the heart.

randall-museum-path_2014-12-07

Randall Museum Pathway – Dec 2014

“The gift is not used up in use”

A goal of walking on Sunday morning is to appease the angry demons, the likes of which roosted in my mood this past week; to help flush them out and diminish their influence.  And to be honest, this mood business is all really the same old tired broken record: the quest for survival of the artist in a world of contradictory desires.

A seesaw in perpetual motion.

Yin choking Yang.

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Playground, Randall Museum – Dec 2014

As Hyde rightly puts it, “the gift is not used up in use…It is the talent which is not in use that is lost or atrophies.” Furthermore, “Bestowal [of one’s gift] creates that empty place into which new energy may flow.” This is salient to remember for those of us who write for ourselves, who confront in some public forum, as Allen Ginsberg called it, “the muck of the mind.” We may desire a larger audience but we know that the writing doesn’t wait for the reader.

shopping-cart-headlights_2014-12-07

 “I know that my body will decay.”

Whitman.

“No fixed identity can relax in the face of this knowledge.” – Hyde.

Hyde also talks about identity in “The Gift” – new identities coming to life as old one’s perish. The decay of Whitman’s leaves of grass is not a death. He solves the poetic calculus astutely: the decay is a renewal.

Mind you, all this talk of altruistic artistry is pleasant, and to couple it with the reading of a young writer whose gift has been bestowed in beautiful form is encouraging, but it’s been a little bit off-putting at this current juncture. When my bad mood lifts and my disappointment at the fallow returns of my artistic effort subsides, I’m sure I’ll cling to the sentiment as true. Perhaps I’ll even embrace it again, as I once used to.

Meantime, though, it seems to me – and the thought occurred to me as we wended our way down the hill towards the Castro for coffee – that perhaps I am undergoing an identity shift; maybe my current decaying frame of mind is akin to the falling of autumn leaves, my mood the changing of the seasons.

koheba-market-st_2014-12-07

Market St near 16th, SF – Dec 2014

We’ve taken to going for walks on Sunday morning.

Yes, I know, I mentioned that.

What I didn’t realize until today is that we have an unwritten rule for our walks; it’s an intrinsic aspect of our nature perhaps. The rule is that we never backtrack on our way home. We always take a different route.

Said differently (and I’ll have to think about whether the metaphor fits): On Sundays, we walk in a circle.

Keith Haring at the de Young Museum – Nov 2014

(In response to my mother, who said of the pictures I posted on Facebook of the Haring exhibit at the de Young Museum: “Doesn’t look like art to me…maybe they [Haring, sic] have squandered their lives..”)

keith-haring-de-young

The voluminous output, the size and magisterial complexity of the pieces and the potent point of view of the artist will leave you, in a way, breathless. It will make you question whether or not you’ve squandered your life.

But that isn’t really the point.

haring-bacchanal-w-girl-in-black

Keith Haring – bacchanal with girl in black, de Young Museum 11/2014

If you look at Haring’s work through the prism of a boy born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1958, who came of age in the 70s and lived as a gay man in the harrowing age of AIDS during a presidency that was utterly silent on the matter and which would have gladly, or at least indifferently, looked upon his death at the age of 31 as either warranted or immaterial, then his art — not classically beautiful, mind you — clearly evokes a new and difficult iconography of beauty and truth.

haring-liberty

Keith Haring – Lady Liberty and a space ship

Capitalism, violence, sex, religion and oppression are the key themes of his work. He presents them in complex, highly structured and yet deceptively simple means. There’s often a playfulness to them: an unexpected joy in the face of relentless oppression and outright hostility. While some of us were aiming to appease the religious country club sect back in the Reagan 80’s, Haring was aiming to expose their hypocrisy.

haring-religion

Eventually, as time progresses (i.e., runs out for him) his canvases become more complicated and potent, more viscerally imbued with his unflinching point of view. His untitled 1985 large piece in red and black, which resembles a bacchanal of imaginary creatures in every imaginable sexual act (image at top of post), is Haring’s ‘Guernica’: it is the undeniable sign of his times.

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Keith Haring – The Last Rainforest

In contrast, his lovingly troubled pink triangle (the pink triangle was the queer equivalent of the Judaic yellow star in Nazi Germany) evokes the fateful notions of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Or in Clintonian terms: don’t ask, don’t tell. Or, in the cadence of Haring’s time, silence = death.
haring-pink-triangle

An artist doesn’t choose his or her voice. S/he chooses to accept it or not. It’s sort of like being gay: you can embrace what you’ve been given and exult in its strange beauty or you can repress it and let it eat away at you bit by bit, year after year. Haring embraced his own peculiar vocabulary of drawing to express his own particular voice, that of a queer man in a vitriolic society in which the gods of money and technology reigned supreme, and let everyone else who wasn’t white, straight, male and therefore ‘chosen’ be damned.

By choosing the expression his voice over the suppression of his voice – whether you liked his methods or had contempt for them – he far from squandered his too-brief time on the planet: he excelled in it.

Keith Haring self-portrait

Keith Haring self-portrait

 

Chasing Pele #3: The zen of malunggay

Oct 6, 2014
Monday morning. The kitchen smells of guava. It’s a sugary pinkish scent, with  undertones of bright green.

A bunch of the guava were ready for picking yesterday, along with some tangerines and calamansi, so I pulled them off the trees and brought them in to the kitchen. We ate the ripest of the guava while Arvin was outside cleaning the lanai railing. I’d slice a bit and feed him, he pausing during a soapy interval to savor the gifts from the yard.

Fruit bowl w guava and tangerine

Today begins, as will every day this month,  as did every day last month – with coffee and a check of the lava flow.

The coffee is middling today. Every day the quality is random. It’s difficult to get it just right. There’s something about a french press that  demands precision yet (in my hands at least) defies the achievement.

As for the lava…

  • The narrow lava flow front has advanced approximately 150 yards since yesterday.
  • Burning trees are producing a significant amount of smoke. While there was no brush fire threat this morning, vog and smoke conditions were moderate to heavy across lower Puna to Hilo.
  • The FAA is now restricting flights over the lava flow.

Big Island Video News will become our constant companion. It’s a new news outlet on the Big Island and its coverage of the lava flow is squashing the meager output of the old school Hilo Tribune-Herald.

 Big-Island-Video-News_2014-10-06

Big-Island-Video-News_2014-10-06

(source: http://www.bigislandvideonews.com/2014/10/06/morning-lava-flow-update-monday-october-6/)

We drink our silty bitter coffee, trying to assuage our tongues by adding ever more milk. Arvin is on a conference call. I am struggling with character development. (The Punatics. Not my own.) And so begins a normal day. The new normal, I guess you could call it. Phase 1: pre-arrival.

In time, after I’ve sorted through the Rinpoche’s motivations, I’ll run my privileged errands in new Pahoa. Arvin’s birthday is tomorrow and we’re having a few people over. Despite the ominous, slow moving cloud upon land known as the Pahoa lava flow, life must go on.

If only…
When you subtract the impending arrival of lava, there’s a certain ease to being in Hawaii. Ease coupled with hard work. Plenty of work. The to-do list has begun and it includes things like scraping and painting the back lanai; hand cutting the 8 foot tall cane grass that’s consuming the tea bed; pruning the four big areca palms; weeding the berm and buddha wall.

These moments of effort and occasional exhaustion are countered by moments of true ease and bliss. Harvesting malunggay leaves, for instance.

For dinner tonight Arvin’s cooking chicken adobo, a classic Filipino dish and a staple on our Hawaiian menu, served with a side of mung beans. We’ll serve the mung beans again tomorrow as a side dish to the grilled meat on his birthday.

As chance would have it, one of the local vendors at Maku’u Market yesterday was selling branches of malunggay, a tall twiggy shrub whose leaves are used to give stew-like dishes nutty and slightly grassy notes. It’s a classic component of mung beans.

So I ran my errands in town, came home and we ate lunch on the dry heat of the lanai. Afterwards, in the shade of the overhang, I gently stripped the branches of their leaves.

If only all the days were so serene: a little writing, bitter coffee, errands, and a zen-like harvesting of fine green leaves.

But that would make us boring, lazy, far too in-the-moment and enlightened. Life is better, I hate to say it, with a bit of struggle.

Malunggay leaves

Malunggay leaves

How to make mung beans:

  • Sautee onion and diced pork loin in oil
  • Add dried mung beans; sautee briefly
  • Add water and/or broth
  • Add chopped tomatoes
  • Add Malunggay leaves (can substitute with spinach, perhaps)
  • Cook until beans are done: soft but not mush