De File

To List Is To Wish

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:40:39 GMT

I still haven't caught up with a world in which people post their wish lists online and actually get a meaningful response. But since nobody asked, I thought I'd give a rundown of my own special desires:

• A six-pack of Jever pilsener that hasn't gone skunky with age
• A large bag full of real sour cherries
• The smell of a sugar-free Monster drink, the sort in the blue-and-black can, on a cold December night
• That Big Red Book of Carl Jung's, recently made available in English
• More friends who are up, literally and figuratively, for indulging my only-after-10-pm night life
• A good showing against Kansas on Tuesday
• A whiff of yatagan
• Credit where credit is due
• A DVD of Germany In Autumn
• The sound of a burbling stream
• A turntable that has both analog and USB outputs
• The discovery of previously suppressed Jean-Jacques Beineix films the equal of Diva
• A human touch
• The use of an apartment in Berlin for a month
• A case of A-Treat red cream soda
• A DSLR worthy of my photographic ability
• The Lego Hogwarts Express
• Coffee with Adam Phillips
• The chance to perform in an avant-garde staging of J.G. Ballard's Crash
• A complete set of the recordings, including outtakes, that Rainer Ptacek made in the last year of his life
• Dinner at the old Café Terra Cotta, at Campbell and River, circa 1997
• My Olympus portable digital recorder, together with its contents, inexplicably vanished sometime in 2008
• A weekend in Mendocino
• That enormously comforting sense of having begun in earnest
• A patron, individual or institutional, to pay me for my writing and editing
• Three hours at The Shelter
• A reason to get the Lox platter at Saul's, sometime in the late 1980s
• The Matchbox Pontiac GTO, #22, from the late 1960s and early 1970s, in purple and with the faux-metallic hubcaps on Superfast wheels
• A surefire regimen for improving one's vertical leap by about six inches
• That spot where the back of the neck becomes the side of the neck
• The strength to pursue my passions now, instead of deferring them to a future that may never come
• A hug

Needless to say, the list could go on longer than a Henry James sentence. But that will do for the moment. If you have any questions, drop me a line.

Late Coming

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:39:01 GMT

Poetry For the People

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:41:40 GMT

I was reading through my copy of the UC Berkeley poetry journal Occident's 1990 edition, its Palmer/Davidson issue. I love the presentation of those two Michael's poems, together with emotionally and stylistically proximate criticism of their work. For that achievement the journal's editor at the time P. Michael Campbell -- someone who always struck me as extraordinarily friendly and welcoming, without any Maude Fife Room airs -- deserves great credit.

The rest of the issue, as is typical with such university-sponsored productions, contains a lot of "in house" contributors, including work by a former professor of mine, undergraduate and graduate poets I'd heard about from my friends and some by people I was close to myself. Interestingly, though, the poem that resonated most for me tonight was Julio Vinograd's spare vignette.

Because she wandered the streets of Berkeley, especially in the vicinity of People's Park, hawking her low-budget chap books and blowing bubbles, Vinograd was looked at askance by many of the folks I knew with aspirations to "lit-ra-tchur", as if she were degrading the brand of poetry by selling it too cheaply on the street. Personally, I always liked her poems, even if they trod the same sonic and thematic landscape. But, because I wasn't an expert like the poets I spent time with, I kept this judgment to myself.

That's why it delighted me to learn, shortly after this issue of Occident came out, that her street poetry had been shaped by a stint at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Not that such a distinction guarantees quality, mind you. Knowing she had come through that rather industrial program confirmed for me both that she knew what she was doing as a writer, even if she did choose to spend her days blowing bubbles on Telegraph, and that the aspects of her work that I wearied of when I read more than a few poems at a time were, in fact, characteristic of Iowa poets in general rather than any specific limitations she might have.

Anyway, the poem I found tonight showcases what she did best, telling stories of the people she encountered out on the street with a cool detachment that demonstrated that, even though her heart was in the right place, her mind was always off to one side reflecting on the scenes in which she invested her compassion:

Just Out of Jail

"Write about me," he stops me on the street.
Bright colored Guatemalan shirt,
luxurious cigarette, husky voice, insistent.
"Tell them I just got out;
I was 3 years in jail."
He takes a deep breath, hesitates,
this is important:
"Tell them I hated being locked up,"
he bursts out indignantly
and then shakes his head
because the words don't say it.
He looks at me doubtfully. It's spring.
Some angry sparrows fight over pizza crumbs.
There's a cardboard box full of free puppies
with their eyes still filmy.
A pretty girl talks to her friends
and doesn't notice her strawberry yogurt's
dripping to the sidewalk,
then she does and squeals.
How could I possibly understand?
3 years.
"Try anyway," he says,
"you've got to tell them;
you've just got to."

While the use of contrast here is probably too pat for most "educated" tastes and the self-reflexivity comes too easily, I am still awed by Vinograd's capacity to craft "poetry for the people." That slogan, taken up by June Jordan and her students, still fires me up. In the end, though, I think the best poetry for the people is less likely to be the overtly engaged sort that tended to come out of Jordan's classes at UC Berkeley than the wry musings of Vinograd's participant observer.

Suture Self

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:58:47 GMT

The Image of Reality

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 02:32:52 GMT

In response to the excellent questions posed by friends who commented on my entry concerning "photographic ethics", I've been thinking hard about how adjustments made prior to the making of a photograph differ, if at all, from those made afterwards, whether in a darkroom or Photoshop.

As I noted in one reply, I can see all too readily how such a distinction would be susceptible to deconstructive critique. I use that term deliberately, since this separation of "before" and "after" strikes me as the sort of subtly ideological move that thinkers like Derrida were keen on interrogating, particularly in the aesthetic realm. Or, if you are of a more psychoanalytic bent, you could invoke the discussion of the "mirror stage", with its paradoxical temporality, to the same end. There is something inside us, whether imposed from without or arising from within, that wants to insist on the linear chronology that makes causality seem inevitable.

Nevertheless, alhough I can imagine how someone would dismantle my argument that what the photographer does prior to the act of recording the play of light is fundamentally different from what she or he does afterwards to make the resulting image presentable, I still feel that this distinction is right and, what is more, with the full moral force that word can bear.

I got out my copy of Walther Ruttman's 1927 documentary Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis last night, a film of crucial importance for my intellectual development back in the early 1990s, and tried to see whether I could pinpoint what moves me about its "candid camera" shots of city life.

I decided that the truth I could impute to those images, my conviction that they captured aspects of Weimar Berlin as they appeared to the people who experienced them firsthand, mattered to me greatly. Recreations in this era of computer graphics run wild may be finely textured to the point where they look real. But knowing they aren't puts them in a different category.

I realize that this example confronts my dilemma obliquely, yet can't help but think that my sense of images from the increasingly distant past's truth is crucial to comprehending why I regard pre-photographic manipulation of focal plane, expopsure and frqaming differently than fixes and improvements undertaken after the documentary record has been established.

That Time of Year

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 06:21:50 GMT

This is the time of year when my desire to partake in the pleasures of the season crashes headlong into a workload that makes it difficult to relax, much less frolic. I should be staying up tonight to grade, since I struggle to get much done when I'm doing parental activities. But I'm just too tired -- mentally -- to manage. Hell, I can't even focus my thoughts long enough to decide on something to watch. For the fourth time this week, I find myself sitting in front of the television with a vague urge to consume something culturally meaningful. Yet the knowledge that whatever I pick may quickly prove tiresome, because I Iack the energy to invest in its reception, makes me feel paralyzed by doubt. I had all sorts of ideas for meaty entries to write here, too, without the will or the way to realize them. At least the lights are pretty, even if my back is turned to them.

Negative Space

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 05:57:18 GMT

Photographic Ethics

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:57:25 GMT

I long imposed a Draconian policy on myself in determining which photographs I would post online. If an image required any "post-processing" in Photoshop at all to pass aesthetic muster, I kept to itself. But then I started to scan old negatives and slides which demanded some adjustments and realized that my code was too inflexible. I decided I could modify photos as long as I didn't give them my standard "photography" tag. More recently, I've started to look through my camera movies for stills to post, knowing that my aversion to the use of flash makes it impossible for me to get passable low-light shots of people and pets in motion any other way. But I don't tag the images I get that way as photographs.

Over the past week, though, as I have been experimenting with true night photography, I've come to understand that even these changes to my policy might not go far enough. I was determined to post my shots of cracked pavement and our car in the moonlight just as I saw them. Although I got the right exposure through a process of trial and error, I discovered that my camera recorded too much color information for the finished product to match my vision as-is. I had to desaturate both photos to give them the nearly monochromatic look that surfaces have for human eyes under those conditions.

But I also learned just how much images vary from monitor. On the LG connected to my G4 from 2002 -- a monitor I have never much liked -- the details in both shots were easy to discern. The first-generation Intel-CPU Mac laptop I've been using as my primary machine, however, rendered both photos so dark that they seemed like allegories for my tendency to be willfully obscure.

So I experimented further with Photoshop. What I came to perceive, though, is that making the photos look right on the laptop drained all the magic from them on my desktop. Since the latter's monitor is technically superior to the laptop's screen, I reverted back to the original exposure in the end. But my decision to desturate both images has still been playing havoc with my sense of photographic truth.

When I was getting ready to post my "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" sunset the night before last, I was tempted to mess around with the exposure to bring out details in the ocean that I recalled from my experience of that day last January. Although a few tentative adjustments made it clear that those details could only emerge at the expense of the sky's beauty, leading me to post the original photograph unaltered, the fact that I was so quick to pursue "improvements" in Photoshop troubles me.

I worry that thise two moonlight shots may prove to have been gateway drugs to an ethically unsavory addiction to the conviction that the photographic record is the starting point for the realization of personal truth. -- what I remember seeing -- rather than the "objective" truth that should serve as an end in itself.

All That's Sublime Melts Into Kitsch

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:49:52 GMT

Breakdown

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:58:08 GMT

For some reason, the last month or so has been filled with unpleasant interruptions in the flow of my relations to the object world. Again and again, things that were functioning normally have broken down without warning. The cars, the computers, the washing machine: I shudder to think what's going to "disfunction" next. And it's not just technology. Glasses have been breaking with unusual frequency. Today I found the cashmere sweater I got Skylar last winter rendered useless by huge holes, most likely torn by a certain cat's teeth. And yet, for all of that, I don't feel particularly fatalistic. Maybe enough of my inner life was already out of joint that I find comfort in its being mirrored back to me from the external world. Maybe I just don't have the energy to get worked up anymore. Or perhaps there's some other factor at work. I keep remembering what it was like after the Bay Area's big earthquake back in 1989. In the immediate aftermath I felt totally intoxicated with adrenaline. Even after several weeks, I still got a rush every time I saw some broken structure or rode on BART at 4am. I don't want to sound too Steven King-like here, but it could be that there's some paranormal force that manifests in times of rupture like this.

A Cold Steel Veil

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 06:38:17 GMT

A Spring In My Step

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 06:51:13 GMT

The last two days have been filled with potentially stress-inducing tasks, from sitting in lots of stop-and-go freeway traffic in the Phoenix area -- the East Valley is absurdly spread out -- to preparing for the delivery of a new washer, which necessitated many hours of rearranging "temporary" boxes in the garage. Not to mention that my allergies have been terrible for the past week, for reasons I just can't discern. But I've been in an extraordinarily good mood, considering. Instead of feeling oppressed by the many burdens of my existence, which has certainly been taxing of late, I am strangely hopeful. Maybe it's because of the great moonlit bicycle ride I went on Tuesday night or the time-exposure photography session it inspired me to pursue after I'd returned home. Or maybe it's simply that whatever natural cycle I'm on simply has me going through a good phase. Whatever the explanation, I'll drink this potion, in which desire is suspended in a base of deep contentment, with relish.

State of Darkness

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:48:34 GMT

Long Time No

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 03:53:22 GMT

It's been a while since I posted much here. But my absence was not the result of a conscious decision to disappear. I just lacked the conditions necessary for me to do much social networking. My parents were out here for Thanksgiving, meaning that I spent a lot of my time bustling about in the kitchen. The whole time they were visiting, my daughter Skylar had the flu, further prying me loose from my daily routine. Although she apparently had the H1N1 strain, it was a mild case. Basically, she had a persistent fever for a week and felt weak and easily overwhelmed by excessive stimulation. I felt bad for her, but am glad she was still able to enjoy her grandparents' visit and partake of the Thanksgiving repast. And then there was the simple fact that my parents' aren't computer people. Although I did have to work on a few deadlines while they looked on, I just didn't feel comfortable blogging in their presence. I had the sense that doing so would be like text messaging at a dinner party. Anyway, I'm back. I grew sort of attached to the freedom that came from not posting, so I may produce fewer entries per week going forward. But despite the anxieties stirred up by my "blogiversary" a few months back, I have decided that it wouldn't make sense for me to call a halt to this journal. As Neil Young didn't say, it's worse to burn out than to fade away. . .

Ochres and Cadmiums

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 06:45:28 GMT

Is It Always Like This?

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:12:24 GMT

Today was strange. I took my last dose of antibiotics. I instigated a stupid argument. I walked around thinking about The Baader Meinhof Complex and whether my Hamlet-esque failures to act when I need to take action indicate prudence or a weakness of will. I tore everything out of the storage space looking for items that were never there and, furthermore, which I pretty much knew were never there and then put it back exactly the way it was before. I bought two toilet seats at Ace Hardware. I bonded with Skylar despite the rough start to the morning and actually had a great time with her shopping for sundries at our Wal-Mart "Neighborhood Market." We made up a version of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" about Sarah Palin featuring the line "Kill a moose! Kill a moose!" My parents arrived from Maryland unscathed. Skylar did the same thing she always does when she first sees them, despite a fever, which is basically to mock torture them as a way of eliciting more affect from them than they usually express. Now I'm getting ready to go to see Fantastic Mr. Fox in the hopes that it will wash away my RAF hangover and the Cure lyric that is my subject header here, which has been stuck in my head for most of the evening.

Self-Portrait at Seventeen (Detail)

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:56:47 GMT

All The Way To Memphis

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:09:09 GMT

I've rarely rooted for the Memphis Tigers. Once when they were underdogs in the Conference USA tournament final against Louisville, a couple of other times against favored major programs. Aside from that, I've been neutral at best. But I'm rooting hard for them tonight. Not only is likable ex-Arizona assistant Josh Pastner coaching his first game, but my former student Jack Murphy, who was in my very first class in the state of Arizona and always went out of his way to indulge my love of college basketball -- he's the reason I had those great seats for Cal's annual visit to Tucson several years running -- is now one of his assistant coaches. I remember the first time Jack came to my office hours, when he explained his plan to build a coaching career. A lot of people talk about the future. Jack did what it took to make it happen. And he also found time along the way to call me from Amoeba Records in Berkeley during the Wildcats' Bay Area trip one year and ask me if there was anything special I wanted. I told him to look for Pearls Before Swine albums that I'd been unable to find in Tucson. The next week he showed up at my office hours with two of them in his hand and enough time in his busy schedule to make time for another one of our conversations about the Pac-10. He's as good a person as you'll ever find in college sports. Seeing him sitting on the sideline tonight, chin in hand, studying the action or giving last-minute tips to Memphis players after a timeout makes truly warms my heart.

Particulates Matter

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:06:27 GMT

About the Audience

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:12:10 GMT

One of the drawbacks of spending most of my time with a camera close at hand is that I end up in way fewer photographs than the friends and family who oblige my documentary impulse. It was thus a great treat for me to see that my friend Joel Schalit had posted a shot of the early arrivals for the first reading on his tour for Israel vs. Utopia.

I'm blurry, fittingly, because I had just been taking shots of him standing at the podium and didn't realize until it was too late that what he was doing. That may sound odd, but I often hold the camera at chest level and make a point of not looking directly at either the view screen or my subject, because I've found that I can circumvent the pressure to pose that way.

I should also mention that the setting for this photograph makes it especially poignant for me. Elliott Bay Book Company, longtime anchor of Seattle's Pioneer Square district, is going to have to vacate the neighborhood. I first explored the store in 1992 on vacation with my then-partner and then happily returned, with Joel and Annalee Newitz, to read from the first Bad Subjects collection in January of 1998. Because the reading area in the basement adjoins the café that was recreated for the television show Frasier, one of many examples of 1990s culture that sold the city's virtues, I felt a touch of celebrity performing there. While the bookstore may live on at a new site, purportedly in Capitol Hill, the special feel of the classic building -- discernible in the brickwork in the back of the room here -- will not survive the transfer.

Bear It Away

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 06:45:24 GMT

I sat down a while ago to write a very short entry about Cal's defeat of Arizona earlier this evening. Then it morphed into a much longer meditation on the fact that sports, even if they seem like a silly waste of time to those who have no passion for them, are no worse -- and no better -- than any other kind of investment in narrative. And then I eventually worked my way back around to say how delighted I was with today's result. But all that typing, five paragraphs worth, was lost when my application crashed before I could post or save what I'd written. I'm taking that as a sign that I should be wary of putting too much stock into the affairs of mortals. Still, I'd rather have them continue than find myself in some ascetic posture that is really a case of making a virtue of necessity. Because the messiness of love provides richer instruction than the crisp, clean reality of those who forego all interpersonal entanglements. Bear up!

99 Luftballons

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:51:52 GMT

A Bright Future?

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:58:51 GMT

I was overwhelmed by my viewing largess tonight, getting to watch the Cal men's basketball team play for the second time in a week in November. And next week I get to see them take on my father's alma mater Syracuse in Madison Square Garden! Even though that I know that these opportunities are coming my way because Cal was ranked in the pre-season poll and realize that their visibility will make this season a struggle in ways that last year never was, I'm excited. Tonight they shook off some of the rust evident on Monday and won going away against a team with a good deal of talent, much of it imported from Indiana after Kelvin Sampson's brief tenure there ended abruptly. And the cushion they carried through most of the second half gave me the chance to see some of their less familiar players showcase their skills. Most impressively, our undermuscled 7'3" center Max Zhang demonstrated that he knows how to play the game the right way, setting nice screens, blocking shots and following misses on the offense end with a sense of purpose. If he can "strengthen up" over the course of the season, he could be the difference-maker this otherwise short team needs.

Well-Timed Entrance

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:43:34 GMT

This college football season was already immensely frustrating for Cal fans before Saturday's scary injury to running back Jahvid Best. And that means that the early arrival of the men's basketball team's season tonight is especially welcome. Mike Montgomery's squad is burdened with high expectations, just like Jeff Tedford's. But I have more confidence in the hoopsters' prospects than I did in that of their gridiron counterparts. When you have four solid seniors and promising role players, together with Montgomery's fine coaching, chances are pretty good that the team will do well. Whether that will be good enough for postseason success is another question. The Bears' December 22nd contest with top-ranked Kansas should be a quite a reality check, not to mention Thursday's game against Syracuse. Right now, though, I'm just happy to see them in action.

Set Theory

cbertsch@livejournal.com — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:43:31 GMT