sunday (morning)
Mary McCarthy from the nyreview of books 50th anniversary supplement, just arrived the other day in the mail
Dejeuner sur l'Herbe
"... His book, he means, is like a neighborhood movie with continuous showings that you can drop into whenever you please - you don't have to wait for the beginning of the feature picture. Or like a worm that you can chop up into sections each of which wriggles off as an independent worm. Or a nine-lived cat. Or a cancer. He is fond of the word 'mosaic,' especially in its scientific sense of a plant-mottling caused by a virus, and his Muse (see etymology of 'mosaic') is interested in organic processes of multiplication and duplication... It is as though Finnegans Wake were cut loose from history and adapted for a cinerama circus titled 'One World.' The Naked Lunch has no use for history, which is all 'ancient history' - sloughed-off skin; from its planetary perspective, there are only geography and customs."
saturday (evening)
George Kucher weather diaries
(his twin Mike b. 1942 survives him and was there; he said a few words before the films started, and also after: couldn't prevent himself from speaking although his voice was hoarse: a stroke two nights before, a hospital stay. It seems he was telling the truth although the way he said it [here and now] you couldn't be sure. Speak when it emerges for soon it will all be passed. Their voices (both his and George's) bely their New York upbringing: that they stood in lines at the bank or on saturday night for a movie (the theaters were palaces) with people in front and behind who were used to seeking daily entertainment in the happenstance of the street. He said he's more private than his brother, his brother was savvier with the technology, you just use what you have, edit right in the camera, before computers, on the television screen, the music's from LPs from the 50s the kind of thing you can't listen to on its own but you put an image to it and something happens. It was odd seeing George on the screen with his mustache and Mike in the flesh with his beard; they have the same tall build with necks jutted forward and Mike's missing a few teeth; the freckles appear in the same distinctive spots on their faces, and they share the same fine slope of nose. He was wearing white pants.)
At one point George goes "up north" which means, judging by the shingles on the house, the Hamptons or Martha's Vineyard or Cape Cod, although each mention of geography is filled with innuendo. He goes whale watching. He fixates on their tails dipping above and below the water. He fixates on water [gushing fluid] in general. At the end, you see him waving from a ferry. In the film's credits he thanks Mimi Gross. He rides around on a bike (which skids in the sand) like other eccentrics I know, equally spiritual/perverse/associative collages running through their minds, who might even similarly seek to document all this and make it into something to watch at a family gathering with plenty of cocktails.
"A reader whose erogenous zones are more temperate than the author's begins to feel either that he is a square (a guilty sentiment that he should not yield to) or that he is the captive of an addict."
The last film they showed was the last film George made, in 2011, before he died. I had grown indifferent to the Oklahoma newscasters pointing to hot/cold air despite the pleasure I'd taken in this at first. He shows himself alone on his Motel bed, rain grating the window-pane, at the library (a landmark). He invites healthy/ ordinary/ contemporary-looking students over who respond with a mixture of enthusiasm and blankness when he shows them things. We see him in a succession of local restaurants, referencing his bowels. The boys he eats Mexican with take pictures with their iphones that the three of them can look at together. Document what's happening now so you can piece it together later even a few minutes later. Lying back on his bed, alone while with them, he says he feels content.
Some of the boys are in the audience. One of the boys sits up front after it's all over to ask and answer questions. I recognize him, by his teeth, from a film in the middle of the program. He asked George to be a character in his own film (Star Man) and then we see him singing songs on his guitar amidst sputterings of rain and wind. George fades to a scene of himself with a seedy guy the two of them in a halo of monitors playing graphic porn. The guy gives him pot ['it makes you turn black and your legs drop off'] and then blows him. We sitting there take in these various acts, the small screens evening out into a single plane with what's happening to George.
The boy up front has arms that could shuck corn. Lights shine from his eyes and a part separates his greasy curls. He sits balletically cross-legged towards the others: so anxious to speak (something written on an index card so as not to forget) that he can hardly listen. He asks why George had a fascination with the midwest, and Mike says it was not the people but the planetary. You go to the source of the thing that fascinates you and this becomes a structuring principle but eventually it hollows out into emptiness and once empty (I hope) renewal.
I haven't emphasized the humor: that as an audience we emit bubbles of laughter: like from a bunch of dirty one-liners. The jokes are his life too so it's solemn. His voice on camera (confessional/ manipulative/ perverse/ direct) makes even the more graphic moments the result of an egoless need to show and tell.
2015 June 18, late morning, by Echo Park Lake, after coffee with CW, the water-lilies in bloom, read:
"The oak tree is growing with anxiety and the olive tree with the anticipation of rain. The mountain behind is listening to thunder. Mind and weather fuse, in the mind's owner and in the weather. The land is obsessed with rivers, floods and heat. Memory is helpless: the mind cannot control it." Etel Adnan Seasons p 6
Two woman (tourists) ask for the table next to mine - we have an umbrella for shade. I glance at them and they glance at me. Their accents sound Swedish. One gets hibiscus iced-tea and a chocolate-chip cookie. The other - her friend - has a heavier build. They turn their chairs to look out over the lake. Behind us, across the lane, a young woman and young man read under a tree. She sits cross-legged. He is lying down. The garbage-man comes to remove the trash. He leaves his cart by my table until he is through. I shift my bag to my feet and then to the table. I use my phone as a paper-weight.