random ways to motivation

James Goetz

The Moirari, 1946

Rambling through The Wit of the Staircase led to online fortune telling—and got me blogging again. I am the Wheel of Fortune. What tarot card are you?


You represent the cycles of life, death, and rebirth.You embrace change, the the ups and downs of life. Fate is something you accept, even when you could possibly change things. Big things tend to happen to you more than other people.


Your fortune:
Something huge is about to happen in your life, and you have little control over it. You must accept your destiny, but luckily it is good fortune that has come your way. Big things and big changes are about to come your way. And while things will be intense for a while, they will be followed by a period of rest.


Link: What tarot card are you?

fiddling while Rome burns

Joel Sternfeld from his book American Prospects

"Science has eliminated distance," Melquíades proclaimed. "In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in every part of the world without leaving his own house."—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

From the New York Times:

Emergency Cooling Effort at Reactor is Failing, Deepening Japanese Crisis

Fiddling While Libya Burns

food stall- part I

The Cantegrill Restaurant, at 111 Nazas where my grandparents' house once stood in Cuauhtémoc, Mexico City

A small bite of ropy, liposuctioned pork chop purchased from the newly remodeled Emilio’s (no longer run by Emilio) outside the California El takes me back to dinner at my grandparents’ in Mexico City circa 1968.

I am the last one at the table. The grown ups sip coffee in the living room and my sisters and cousins are watching Astro Boy take on another slew of alien invaders in the small TV room across the hall. An unsavory piece of meat with the consistency of cud is lodged between my gum and cheek. Every so often I squeeze and suction the saliva that accumulates, but I can’t bring myself to swallow the sinewy ball. My grandmother and the servant girl swish in and out clearing the table. My grandmother monitors the lump in my cheek with amusement. In her Depression era influenced version of the world, there is no connection between bad food and dysphagia.

Before every meal we bring palms together, bow our heads and regurgitate, “Thank you, Papa Dios, for this food we are about to receive even though we are undeserving. Amen.” Food is a cold, scientific fact of life for for my grandmother. You need it to live and you can't allow taste buds to jeopardize your chances for nourishment. This very instant, there are children in other parts of the world that would give anything for that piece of meat clumped in your mouth. Yes, even for that cold, wet, insipid wad of flesh. Here, as at home, the rule stands: no one leaves the table without cleaning the plate. That includes swallowing. My grandmother sees the bulge still in my cheek and cackles; the servant girl smiles compassionately.

My parents must be out of town; we’re sleeping over. From the bed I share with my sister, I spy on my grandmother as she undresses in the dark with her back turned to us. The gleaming white slip is replaced by a cotton nightgown with a speed not even Astro Boy could match. I hear the oceanic roar of the city, a car turning from Poo onto Nazas, the hurried steps of a woman on heels. I can’t remember ever swallowing that ball of meat. The last sound as I drift off is the calliope of a sweet potato vendor heading south towards Reforma Avenue.

art hoarders face the music ... reluctantly

Andy Warhol

5 Coca Cola Bottles, 1962

Today’s NYT’s story “’This Space for Rent’: Arts Must Now Woo Commerce” reports on the crisis European museums face as government subsidies and corporate contributions dry up. To remain viable, European museums are now renting their facades and facilities to advertisers and corporate sponsors.

The sellout hasn’t gone without an outcry. Famous architects and museum directors petitioned Italy’s Minister of Culture last summer to remove huge ads that detract from Venice’s classic views. And, at least in one instance of the unseemly coupling, the aesthetic yardstick was levered against the commercial barbarians. The Musée d’Orsay may have sold out to Chanel No. 5, but drew a line when it came to Coca Cola. “The flacon of Chanel is beautiful because it is made in three dimensions and moves with the wind,” said an insider at d’Orsay. Take that, Andy Warhol!

Link: The New York Times

Heriberto Yépez makes me go coastal!

Sir Francis Drake Circumnavigation World Map

It’s been a long time (maybe never) that I felt this euphoric with a writer. I mean, like sighting new land, unapologetically Columbian in my discovery. And cocky, too, amid familiar landmarks. That is, until I brush the shores of otherness. Tijuana. Matamoros. True, my hybrid gear, my half-ass ability to code-switch, my dubious passport got me invited to a dinner of chicken flautas and toothpaste flavored cool whip pie in the kitchen of an undocumented family in the southwest side of Chicago more than once. I enjoyed the cozy satisfaction of the insider, even as I knew damn well I never really left the “simulated sky” of my “indestructible egg”.

“Soy parte del deslinde. Solamente que no soy uno más de los migrantes hacia el norteamiento. Todo rumbo es autoritario. El zig zag que llevo todavía no tiene nombre. Y al que se lo ponga: balazo. No lo olviden: soy francotirador, a.k.a., tu paranoia.”

--Heriberto Yépez
La Bifurcación de las Cosas

blisters and snow

A quiet Christmas day in Chicago, the snowiest since 1997. At noon, we took a walk to perform a good deed and visit a cat whose owners skipped town for three weeks. Except for the main thoroughfares, the side streets were still fairly pristine. Not much traffic and few pedestrians. “Twinkle snow, powdery snow” but same grey Chicago underneath. Gusts of wind sprayed our faces with showers of tiny ice needles.

We took the long way back so we could walk down Logan Boulevard and look at the trees: the gnarly branched catalpas, the squat apple trees, the arrow straight lindens glistening in the steel colored sky in all their fractal nakedness.

I phoned Texas. My mother couldn’t talk. Her mouth is full of blisters from the chemotherapy she started over a week ago to treat the secondary cancer in her liver. She had a few good days and her spirits were up, then the side effects. In the past three days she has refused the phone. Today I insisted. I said, “You can’t talk, but you can hear.” She struggled to mumble back something. I said, “I’m thinking of you and I send you all my love.” Then I felt guilty for forcing “all my love” on her. Her fragility only accentuates my clumsiness.

In the afternoon I baked a beautiful, perfectly textured, molasses-soaked, ginger upside-down pear cake. If you have three hours to spare, you, too, can enjoy this simple pleasure (Leslie Mackie’s Macrina Bakery & Café Cookbook).

Today, I try to string together disparate thoughts of snow, caramelized pears, and mouth sores. Pandora generates a Proustian concoction of haunting themes: Debussy’s Claire de Lune, Albéniz’ Mallorca, Chopin’s Prelude No. 4. Amid the snow blankets of memory, I hear her at the piano. Every night, after putting us to bed and finishing the days’ chores, my mother knuckled down. She also tried to practice during the day, but with five boisterous children these sessions often turned into harangues. As the years went by, she gradually stopped playing. Now, the neuropathy has damaged her hands for good.

We got three more inches of snow over night. The day is sepulchral grey.

tea in a cup

Yoko Ono at the BALTIC in 2009

Link: Flickr

Apparently, I'm over a 17 month long writer's block.

I sit down to document the first tea brewed in the white porcelain Japanese teapot I brought back from Texas a few weeks ago after visiting my ailing mother. It has been tucked away in her china cabinet for thirty years. Did she ever serve tea in all that time?

The pot is similar to one I’ve had for as long as my mother’s has sat in her cabinet, a gift from a friend back in college. I always liked its simplicity, its pleasant round shape and wicker handle. The lid broke years ago and the handle was warped from water damage. So, as soon as I spotted my mother’s, I made a comment about inheriting it. She told me to take it already, along with a set of seven cups and six saucers. She had no explanation for the mismatch.

Before pouring, I wonder if it will make a difference to drink out of this wide mouth, paper-thin cup sitting quietly on its saucer. The green liquid streams from the spout into the white bowl. Bubbles rise and huddle in the middle, a sparkling island. Wisps of steam rise quickly from the inside walls of the cup. I take the first sip. Not strong enough.

I get up and walk over to the kitchen with the teapot and add another teaspoon of green leaves. My kitchen is bordering on chaos. One more dirty dish, one more can or package out of place and I’ll have to call in experts. A baking sheet is soaking on top of the sink, which in turn is filled with haphazardly placed frying pans, chopping blocks and assorted silverware. I’ve dirtied every single plate, large and small. They are stacked on the side of the sink along with multiple cups, empty food cans, a flower vase…

I return to the sun-drenched dining room. The snowy rooftops sparkle in the distance. The table is cluttered with items from yesterday’s baking party, a watering can, fabric swatches, an external hard drive, Lévi_Strauss’ The Savage Mind with the Continental Airlines bev nap marking the last page I read on my way back to Chicago, thread spools, a grocery list… I sip more tea.

Motivation for writing: a need for ritual, some deliberate action to jolt me back into consciousness after days (if not weeks) of overdosing on celebrity gossip, tales of bad plastic surgery, bizarre crimes… Yes people, this is how I get away from it all these days. It is somehow more palatable to gawk at Michaela Romanini’s visage than to sit with my pain. The important thing is to dissociate, to not think about one’s mother slowly dying of cancer in another part of the country, passing blood in her stool, running fevers several times a day, blaming it all on the excess sauce that dad put in her eggs yesterday morning. Extra sauce is more comprehensible than metastasizing cells in one’s liver.

Last week, Yoko Ono reminisced about tea and laughter with John Lennon on the thirtieth anniversary of his death. This afternoon, I grieve alone for my mother over tea brewed in a teapot that has sat in a china cabinet for the same number of years. Our family home is stuffed with a lifetime of silent objects frozen in time. Mine is a disarray of daily living, a jumble of orphans screaming for attention.

I lift the lid on the teapot and peer inside: a private lily pond, the emerald green of forty minutes ago now the color of urine.