Sunday, May 31, 2009
yayoi kusama / more polka dots
in my teenage-angst phase i had this poster above my bed for many years. the edges got so frayed by the duct tape that i had to throw it away.
"yayoi kusama: flowers that bloom at midnight" is on exhibition at the gagosian gallery in beverly hills from may 30 to july 17.
exiled to english / ha jin
Exiled to English
Boston
I WAS in the People’s Liberation Army in the 1970s, and we soldiers had always been instructed that our principal task was to serve and protect the people. So when the Chinese military turned on the students in Tiananmen Square, it shocked me so much that for weeks I was in a daze.
At the time, I was in the United States, finishing a dissertation in American literature. My plan was to go back to China once it was done. I had a teaching job waiting for me at Shandong University.
After the crackdown, some friends assured me that the Communist Party would admit its mistake within a year. I couldn’t see why they were so optimistic. I also thought it would be foolish to wait passively for historical change. I had to find my own existence, separate from the state power in China.
That was when I started to think about staying in America and writing exclusively in English, even if China was my only subject, even if Chinese was my native tongue. It took me almost a year to decide to follow the road of Conrad and Nabokov and write in a language that was not my own. I knew I might fail. I was also aware that I was forgoing an opportunity: the Chinese language had been so polluted by revolutionary movements and political jargon that there was great room for improvement.
Yet if I wrote in Chinese, my audience would be in China and I would therefore have to publish there and be at the mercy of its censorship. To preserve the integrity of my work, I had no choice but to write in English.
To some Chinese, my choice of English is a kind of betrayal. But loyalty is a two-way street. I feel I have been betrayed by China, which has suppressed its people and made artistic freedom unavailable. I have tried to write honestly about China and preserve its real history. As a result, most of my work cannot be published in China.
I cannot leave behind June 4, 1989, the day that set me on this solitary path. The memory of the bloodshed still rankles, and working in this language has been a struggle. But I remind myself that both Conrad and Nabokov suffered intensely for choosing English — and that literature can transcend language. If my work is good and significant, it should be valuable to the Chinese.
salman rushdie on slumdog millionaire
salman rushdie is hilarious!
he says: slumdog millionaire is a "patently ridiculous conceit... as a result, the film beggars belief."
paris, texas
i still can't stop obsessing over my recent drive to coachella for the music festival. i left l.a. on friday night, after work. i drove by myself, with the convertible top up.
i was listening to the soundtrack ry cooder recorded for wim wenders' paris texas (which won the palm d'or at cannes in 1984). it's surreal driving down a one-lane winding road through the desert with no streetlights listening to the twang-twang of his steel-string guitar.
i'm not crazy about david lynch like most in l.a., i didn't even think "dark night of the soul" was that great (i went to the opening last night too at the michael kohn gallery; i do like the flaming lips mix though; for $50 i bought the stupid book anyway)... but it was a real lynch-ean moment.
alternatively you can watch my favorite scene which is also excerpted on the soundtrack, when the main character finally finds his ex-wife in a penny arcade after all these years. the cinematography is breathtaking. look at his reflection in the glass.
i'm a feather-cloaked mighty thunder.
i wore my techni-color dream coat last night at the opening at the gagosian in beverly hills. the cameraman who was taping the show followed me around everywhere. its such a showpiece.
i bought it from my friend sielian, who owns a vintage store on melrose and doheny. she started out with a plot at the melrose trading post, until all the celebrities persuaded her to open a store in west hollywood. she's great.
it's a vintage geoffrey beene swing-coat, from the sixties, in the vein of edie sedgewick, who in turn comes from a long line of dilettantes. you have to try it on to understand. once you put it on you feel like you are wearing a cloud. it imparts levity to my so-called life.
by the way, the yayoi kusama show was all pathology and polka-dots; it made me want go insane too. she lives in an asylum, voluntarily, in tokyo. i thought maybe a polka-dotted dress would have been more appropriate for the occasion. i have this great de la renta one, but i'm not sure if it still fits.
maybe it wasn't so genius, but i kept saying: "thoughts on dots?" while laughing hysterically (they caught this on tape, i know). it was almost a dr. seuss nightmare. no one answered, no one thought it was funny, but francine, my fox-fur sidekick from paris, replied: "no thoughts, but i'll have another plastic cup of that chardonnay, s'il vous plait."
francis bacon
there's a new francis bacon retrospective at the met. i stumbled upon this picture of him posing next to meat. i think its pork. it must be pork. then look at the painting.
bacon once said that he wanted his pictures to "look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory, a trace of past events as the snail leaves its slime."
a friend then told me that marcel proust had a similar childhood memory. he discussed the trace of human slime, which he likened to that of a snail, except that he used the analogy to describe his first wet dream.
from my new short story: the canto pop starfish
Starfish have two stomachs. One stomach digests; the other extends outward to engulf prey. This feature of their anatomy allows a sea star to hunt creatures that are much larger than its mouth would otherwise allow.
They say that a star is born when a girl is about to break in her career.
Since the mermaid cannot sing, she is stillborn, a starfish, a murderous mutation.
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