I’m still alive.  I’m writing the cemetery book.  sometimes the skies over los angeles look just like this, no artificial enhancements needed.

it’s a sad thing to see a neglected blog. what happened? did the blogger get busy or lose interest? did he or she run out of things to say? or did something terrible happen?

something close to 95% of blogs just stop at some point. but the stake in the ground remains. the blog name and address, and the past posts. are they more or less valuable when the new material stops coming?

terra nullius means, land that belongs to no one. in practice, this legal concept has tended to mean that territory which is “unimproved” by its inhabitants is free for the taking. in the days of the Homestead Act, a homestead was free land you could claim, but you had to “improve” it in order to maintain your claim.

I am not so sure that new buildings should always be called “improvements” (as they still are in real estate law.) not everything that comes anew is welcome. as alain de betton reminds us: “There are few harsher indictments against architecture than the sadness we feel at the arrival of bulldozers.”

if the blog is to continue, some things will have to change. I can no longer hang the whole thing on the armature of photographs, since I will not be able to take new pictures at a sufficient rate to keep things going. there are only so many possible views of my windowsill, and I believe I have taken them all already.

so, you know what they say: if you’re losing the game, change the rules. like europeans in the new world, I find my way cleared for me by disease. I know the fine old John Winthrop quote about “God hath thereby cleared our title to this place,” etc. etc. I don’t subscribe to theories of either meaning or opportunity when it comes to horrible diseases, my own or anybody else’s. the only thing you can do is live with the knowledge that things have truly changed.

go ahead. just try and mess with me, and see how far you get.
Gerhard Marcks, “Freya,” Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, UCLA.

at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, there is a Richard Serra sculpture called “Wake.”

Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle

looking down at the sculpture from the pavilion, which occupies the highest corner of the park, it invites you to come closer. those wavy forms look like they are going somewhere, and you might want to tag along for the ride, to get up close to them and discover the secret of their purposefulness.

and that deep orange-brown color seems to assert something tough and industrial amid the young trees and new plantings (this picture was taken in Fall 2007; the park must be more grown in by now.)  the site of the Olympic Sculpture Park used to be an oil-transfer facility, and no doubt there are ghosts of the place’s industrial past hanging about, not to mention the spirits of ships,  which still seem adventurous to me even though the ships here would have been oil tankers and their tasks quite routine.

we are not quite sure how we feel about that bland corporate presence in our background.
Richard Serra, “Wave”, Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle

I find that all my pictures of “Wave” are pretty rotten, with an underexposed black hole on the shadowy side of each element (it was a ridiculously idyllic sunny day when I was there – and they tell me that Seattle is rainy!)  but never mind that.  what I did capture, here and there, was people coming up to the sculpture and doing what they have been asked, most nicely, not to do.

Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle

someone is TOUCHING THE ART. Richard Serra, “Wave,” Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle

I used an image of that plaintive little blue sign recently, in a post on a subject other than art.  but was reminded of it again when I was on campus at UCLA, getting a few pictures of the Murphy Sculpture Garden over the holiday weekend.

Gerhard Marcks, “Maja,” Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, UCLA

there’s a nice big Serra at UCLA, too.  its name is T.E.U.C.L.A., for Torqued Ellipse UCLA.

“T.E.U.C.L.A.”, Richard Serra

artists and architects alike love Cor-Ten steel.  what’s not to love?  look at the skin it gets. it is a kind of patina that forms, rusty-looking, but very stable and protective.  so I am told.

I reflected before, in a post called “the touch gallery,” on how art outdoors immediately becomes art you can handle.  art indoors – unless you own it, and usually not even then – hands off.  I was well trained not to so much as point at a painting while discussing it with someone, lest I trip and give a painting an inadvertent poke.  but outdoors?  where the work is already subject to the wind, the weather, the birds, the squirrels, freeze and thaw, earthquakes, acid rain?  we can attempt to add a little layer of protection from the additional threat of human hands, try to enforce some sense of respect, but such efforts seem doomed to be overwhelmed.  it certainly seems to even a casual glance that the Serra up at UCLA has been taking quite a beating  – the more so because it has a conveniently secluded interior, within which an additional level of mayhem seems possible.

I don’t know enough about Cor-Ten steel to know how much of this damage can be cleaned off, or repaired. some of what I saw were actual gouges, but most of it seemed like surface markings. some, the casual side effect of the irrestible urge to touch; some seemed more like deliberate attacks.

there was a story, a little while ago, about a woman in a museum who tripped and stuck her hand through a Picasso. and another story, a few more years ago than that, of the casino owner who had a painting – another Picasso – and was getting ready to sell it, when he got too excited talking about it with his dinner guests and backed into the painting and ripped it. these kinds of stories seem so horrible, as if a terrible unforgivable sin has been committed. I asked my personal art historian about this (everyone should have one, they are very useful) and she just about pshawed my ear off.  “it’s a painting! they can fix it! stuff happens!” and, she added, she was amazed that more stuff doesn’t happen, even though there are guards and rules, with so many paintings hanging in so many museums all over the world.

we both decided, far worse: the destruction of the Mayan codices, the burning of the library at Alexandria, the Taliban blowing up those stone Buddhas in Bamiyan – the willful silencing of the voices of the past.

when we create things and put them before the world, some degree of attrition, some level of risk, seems inevitable; and all our works are perishable as we are. our creations occasionally enjoy the privilege of dying a little more slowly than we do, but we shouldn’t mistake their life spans for eternity. (I spend enough time in cemeteries to have some thoughts on that subject.)

George Tsutakawa, “Obos 69,” Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, UCLA

the Murphy Sculpture Garden is a truly world-class collection. it’s easy to forget this, when it’s so close by, and free, and so familiar. a quick photo expedition turned into a little more time and energy than I had planned to spend, but that’s the price I pay for getting interested in something other than own perilous physical condition. I’m willing to pay it, once in a while. along with the other things I need, I need art, and food for thought, and to ponder the question: how vulnerable is art?  is it stronger than we think it is?

Francisco Zuniga, “Mother With Child At Her Hip,” Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden

she’s a bruiser, no doubt.  I wouldn’t want to cross her if I could possibly help it.  but then again…

Robert Graham, “Dance Column I”

I think this dame is pretty formidable too.  this picture makes her look big, but she’s really a little doll-like figure, balanced on top of a column next to her sister. you or I would find her position precarious, but look at the expression on her face. she’s not up there because she climbed up to get away from anybody. she’s up there because she knows exactly what she can do, and she would like you to know it too.

Robert Graham, “Dance Column II”

nevertheless, a holiday weekend still feels different to me.  I don’t show up to an office on Mondays these days; but there are some things I’m putting off that can only be done during business hours, and so the realization that Monday would be a holiday gave me a nice feeling of reprieve on Sunday, that pillowy snow-day feeling, one extra day in which not getting around to those unpleasant tasks need not be on my conscience.

procrastination, like work, tends to expand to fill the time available.  but it has been difficult for me to adjust to life here in Opposite Land, where my accustomed strategies for coping with the world no longer apply.  instead of rushing out to meet the world in the frantic expectation that I’ll miss something important if I don’t get moving - now, I have to hesistate.  I’m supposed to.  my physical therapist talks about the “energy envelope.”  here in my particular invisible city, the capital of opposite land, I have to doubt some of my own instincts, resist the message my brain sends out every morning that tells me a day passes too fast, that I’m going to miss something if I don’t get cranking, that I must fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.  instead, I have to tune into a different signal.  it’s not enough to wake up and realize “I feel bad,” because this is no longer news; I have to inquire more closely, interrogate myself – how bad, today?  where are the boundaries of the envelope?  what can I get away with today?

and I have to ask advice, something I am not accustomed to doing.  I have to ask my physical therapist, what can I do?  because I’m dying to do something, but afraid I’m going to hurt myself.  I ask my shrink, what am I ready to do now?  because I’m dying to do something, but I’m really afraid.  of course, neither of them is actually going to make a final ruling; they’re just going to reflect my questions back at me. but I still have to ask.

a friend stopped by to drop something off, and when I went out to meet him I had acetone on my hands, from my attempts to clean up some shellacky stuff that had spilled in my bathroom.  he must have smelled something funny, because he gave me a sharp look and said “I smell pot.”  I denied it, strenuously, repeatedly, said it must be the neighbor.  why I should have fallen all over myself to deny that I was whiffy in that way, I only wondered later.  certainly not because I was talking to someone who would disapprove – although I think he knows me well enough that he would be surprised, and probably very amused, to catch me in such an act.

there’s probably a lot of reasons why I’ve never been a drug user, and not all of them just because I’m such an upright and law-abiding citizen, whose worst legal transgressions have mostly consisted of parking incorrectly and trespassing now and again.  and even though I have probably more justification than most to seek a prescription for medical marijuana – prescriptions that I understand are not at all difficult to get, since the process takes advantage of the universal truth that everyone’s got something the matter with them – I haven’t tried.  I am both uninterested and too tempted, both afraid and unconcerned.  I have chronic pain and all kinds of heebie-jeebies and maybe this is something that could help me; but because I have a weird and poorly understood illness, I could just as easily flip the coin to the other side and say the illness is the reason I shouldn’t do it. nobody really knows – there’s no data.  and I have limits to how much experimenting I care to do on myself.

I have only a detached kind of interest in medical marijuana, but I am endlessly fascinated by the phenomenon of the DISPENSARIES.  all these businesses sprouted up so quickly, when my attention was elsewhere; it just seemed like one day, I looked around and they were everywhere, very much like mushrooms after an excess of rain.  without knowing anything at all about the legal conditions that enabled them to sprout up so fast and display themselves so publically, you could make careful field observations and try to draw conclusions from them.

family members came to visit me when my illness got very bad, and I played safari guide when we drove around town.  look, I said, there’s one – and another one.  keep a sharp eye out for the identifying marks – the green cross or caduceus, the green color in general (extra points for green neon), the words “dispensary,” “collective,” “caregivers,” “compassionate.”  I exhibited the dispensary ads in the alternative newsweeklies, as an illustration of the dynamic tension between images evoking stoned grooviness and strained attempts to assume an appearance of medical respectability.

at some of them, there is an armed guard stationed out front.  (there’s a non-dispensary business in my neighborhood, some kind of “medical spa,” that tacked a very cranky sign on their door:  a reaction to nuisance knocks, or to something worse?)

we see ruderal plant species in nature, like fire followers or agricultural weeds, that quickly move into an ecological niche when it opens up, grow aggressively and blossom quickly, and die just as quickly.  and I understand that the dispensaries are also an ephemeral phenomenon.  the City has been ponderously clomping forward with its plans to shut down a number of the dispensaries.  I understand the day of doom is very close.

so I feel a sense of urgency, that if I want to get out and see these things and take some shots, I’d better hurry.  but of course I cannot hurry, so I have to content myself with the few shots I can get here and there, instead of the grand scheme that my mind invents, to photograph every last one of them, and plot their locations on a map.

many of my shots are not so good.  I had wanted to illustrate the phenomenon whereby the dispensaries go from shabby and disreputable to chi-chi stylish as you drive north on Robertson Boulevard, from National to Beverly, but those shots didn’t turn out so well. a bunch of them turned out overexposed because I had been fiddling with my new camera and left a setting wrong somewhere.  I could have gotten home and wept with frustration; these days I don’t always deal so well with disappointments.  but instead I laughed at myself. and said: look!  I screwed up in a new way! couldn’t have done that with my old camera! I must be learning something.

and, like a good naturalist, I had to work quickly and unobtrusively so as not to disturb my subjects; I was warned that the dispensary people would get antsy if someone was standing around taking pictures of their establishments, and that it would be especially not cool to take pictures of the customers coming and going. so I have been careful.  ”run and gun” doesn’t work so well when you can’t run, and fighting traffic, it turns out, is hard work for the body as well as aggravating for the psyche, so I have had to pick my moments.

sunday was a good day for dispensary-hunting.  light traffic,  and it finally started getting warm again, and I found I felt not so bad.  I drove from west to east and from north to south and got a few, from hippie-hempy …

…to grimly noncommittal.

the grand project I have in my mind, to get shots of them all before they disappear, will never happen.  I know if I weren’t sick there would be some other reason I couldn’t do it – too busy with work, too preoccupied with some personal matter.  I’ve never been inside a dispensary, but I am fully willing to believe that it is always 4:20 at the green oasis.

my green oasis, however, is different. I go to the park, some afternoons, to lie on the grass.  I read about two pages of a book, and then lie about and watch the tops of the trees, watch the little planes take off from the local airport, watch the world turning. when I do this, I feel not so bad.  sometimes I even feel good. I forget about my unproductivity, my burdensomeness, the burning question of my worth.  I should never, ever admit this out loud, but amid all the pain and grief, sometimes being disabled can feel like a holiday weekend.  for a moment or two.