warriormonkey

Ashes and Snow

Not far from the Santa Monica Pier, in an ordinary lot, stands a 34-foot high building constructed of 152 rail cars.

This 56,000-square-foot temporary structure was designed by renowned architect Shigeru Ban to house the traveling exhibit Ashes and Snow.

Inside, the rail cars are connected with draped tarps, covering a cool, dimly lit space floored alternately with pine planks and smooth grey stones.

It’s a beautiful place before you even start looking at the exhibit.

The temporary museum houses more than 100 large-scale photographic works and three accompanying 35mm films by artist Gregory Colbert. Each piece plays in a timeless space where animals interact with humans.

With the feeling of life lived deep in the Sub-Continent, Colbert brings peace to the chaotic quest for survival. His human subjects sit and lay docilely allowing animals to come to experience them as part of their shared space – nudging hands, lying together, wandering past. He is – in a way – exploring the power of submission.

Huge, lumbering beasts like elephants, on their knees, as if bowing to their equally subject humans. Beautiful hawks swooping over the outstretched hands of a white-clad woman. A leopard leaning off a canoe to lick the head of a woman swimming near him.

The images are all the more arresting because they are real. No retouching or simulating.

As much as I enjoyed the two smaller exhibits, the main exhibit was a little overwrought for me – pressing the beauty, abandoning the subtlety of the other stories. Still, a lovely one-and-a-half hour tour in a place beautifully designed for the art.

Los Angeles

I'm not long back from my first trip to L.A. A disquieting place , I would think, for anyone who has read either of the great communist works - the New Testament or the Marx-Engels Reader.

It's the garish pairing of the most beautiful land in the world awash with the ugliest things man can do to it. Commerce and poverty smack up against each other. Completely separate worlds not inches apart. 

Women walking $5,000 immaculately bred house dogs past literally hundreds of homeless, surrounded by their belongings and sleeping in the ocean-front park. The successful meandering in and out of expensive shops past an old woman begging on her knees for change. They seem not to see each other. To be acting out some elaborate play on the theme of desensitizing. 

For the seeming banality of it, surely there must be tension there. And, for all the fun I had there, I couldn’t help but be afraid of it – of my powerlessness to affect these hopeless lives. And, of coming not to notice them.

bella: flattery

of course he would choose your sister. at once the most cruel and flattering of betrayals.

he would choose you again. the way he remembers you. before the lines on your face, the passionless quarrels. the brutal intimacy of a shared life.

he'd still eat your mother’s bitter apple pie. and, wash the already spotlessly clean cars with your father, even out in the snow.

of course he’d choose all your shared mistakes again.

but just now, just for a while, without the struggles and silent condemnations. with that sweet, lulling attraction. with the ringing laughter, that sound you’ve so long forgotten.

the same, but not the same. a few years gape widely between you – one remembering awkward dinner conversation and hand-me-down clothes. the other a teenager after the great shift, part of the naked intimacy of loss and fear.

it shows. they all see it. decades later, one achingly uncomfortable in every interaction, tilting at empathy and settling somewhere closer to obligation. the other full of casual grace, the center of the conversation, the lips that smile easily, the life everyone knows.

but there are still these things you share. the stories, the people, the gestures. he knows. there lies at once familiarity and whimsical strangeness.

for the love and hate of you. of course he would choose her.