Play of the day*

My first oil painting (ever), pictured above.

I picked it up tonight at the second in a 6-week series of still life classes. The whole thing–the painting itself, the class, the charming crowd of diverse participants–is made more magical and meditative because we meet each Monday night to paint at Barnsdall Art Park. Hello Hollyhock.

And who knows? Maybe I’m the next (less psychotic and more symmetrical) Van Gogh?

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*I feel I do not post enough plays of the days. For this, my apologies.+

+Also: I’ve noticed a maudlin trajectory in recent posts. For this I will not apologize. But I do promise more lively, amusing and generally jolly posts in the near future. ^

^But, in my defense, I’ve been listening to a lot of Father John Misty lately. Anyone with a heart would be vulnerable to maudlin prose if that band served as their writerly soundtrack.

Play of the Day

One of my two esteemed slumlords, Josh, played guitar backup tonight  at The Other Side for a lovely rendition of David Lynch’s “You and I.“*

The Other Side is a gay piano bar that is, alas, approaching its final days in Silver Lake. Unsubstantiated word on the street is that this amazing, hidden outpost of kitsch and glory will be converted into a sportsbar sometime in the next few months.

Sigh… Would that I had found it sooner. What terrible fools would turn a gay piano bar into anything other than what it so fabulously is? And where will I go when I want to hear good Beyonce covers by perfectly coiffed twinks, or just plain good looking gay men with beautiful voices, sitting and singing their hearts out behind an electronic keyboard masked as a grand piano?

Oh, sweet Other Side. I knew you for but one night and will love you forever!

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*Let it be known that, as all this went on, the Disney Channel also happened to be the station of choice on one of the television sets above the bar, and that on said channel was broadcast a young adult film written by a friend of mine. Oh Los Angeles, you are truly an enigmatic and wonderful mistress!

Play of the Day

In Berlin tonight, on our way to dinner, we made a left onto Leibnizstrausse, passed Walter Benjaminstrausse and made a right onto Kantstrausse.

Even better (though I did not wander here): Karl-Marx-Strausse intersects somewhere in this city with Hegelstrausse.

I recognize this spatial joke is selling itself to a very tiny niche market. It just happens I’m in that particular niche. Hopefully one among you, oh readers of mine, is too.*

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*Mexico City has its own version of literary and philosophical street-naming phenomena. I’ve mentioned it before. I probably will do so again.

Play of the Day

I was recently asked to be the ‘cultural consultant’ on a film set in Albuquerque. It is the pet project of an art-wardly thinking (if I may coin a term) friend of mine. I went over to said friend’s house tonight for dinner to give him notes on the script and was pleased to discover that, based on dialogue alone and some minor aesthetic directions, I could geographically locate the homes of the characters.

Landscape sticks to a person. One knows the city that is, for better or worse, one’s hometown. It’s the kind of epistemological position you can struggle against but never, entirely, escape.

Good to have confirmed that space-based knowledge travels. And good that Los Angeles can deliver to a wayward Burqueño, via the strange machinations of film-making, home.

Play of the day

Oh dearest readers (dwindling in number though you may be, just as the time I have remaining in this fine city), I have for you a set of photos from both outside and within my favorite building in Buenos Aires. It is an old Art Nouveau structure on Avenida Rivadavia. A friend of mine used to work on the second floor and offered me a little tour yesterday before he gives up his keys to the joint for good.

He claims the place is haunted (not to worry, he also says the ghosts are quite friendly). Ghost stories abound in this city. Myths and legends of all sorts, really. And you can see why in buildings like this. These incredible structures, built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (often, as with this office, modeled after the European architecture that was popular at the time) are more concentrated in San Telmo, Recoleta and Barrio Norte, but they pepper the streets of all the central neighborhoods. This building is in Congreso, just a few blocks down from the plaza.

These buildings are set apart from their European counterparts both by their relative disrepair–with a series of political and economic crises following their construction many suffered stretches with no one to care for them–and by their context within the surrounding architecture. Often they sit next to brutal, barren high rises, or share walls with cheaply-constructed apartment buildings.

They have been among my favorite things the city offers to those who traverse it. Little sparkling treasures that pop up in the oddest of places to stop you in your pedestrian tracks.

If I were a ghost, I’d haunt these places too.