This is a new exhibit, just opened. On the day self went, there was a long line stretching to the street.
Posting for Travel with Intent’s Six Word Saturday.
Category: Artists and Writers
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Self is currently reading Con/Artist: A Memoir, by Tony Tetro, about his life as a “world-renowned” art forger (His main claim to fame is that he gulled Prince Charles into buying a Picasso, Dali, Monet, and Chagall, “insuring them for over 200 million pounds,” when they were “actually Tetros.”) He spent a year in jail when the forgeries were exposed (A year?) and then went on to write this memoir, which got a very favorable review in the Wall Street Journal, about a week ago. This book was co-authored (the co-author’s name is in very small print) by Giampero Ambrosi.
Chapter One is about his art education, in high school in Fulton, New York. He name-drops like mad! Then relates an anecdote of Michelangelo, only 22 when he began working on the Pieta, that has the artist sneaking “into the Vatican” to carve “his name on the sculpture — the only artwork he ever signed,” because rumors were going round that “his masterpiece had been made by one of his rivals.” Tetro commiserates: “I don’t blame him. It’s ironic considering what I do, but years later when I forged a piece that somebody else claimed, I think I understood what Michelangelo must have felt.”
Clearly, he can relate to the best! Anyhoo, self finds his constant calling attention to himself quite exhausting, and is glad that there are only two pages left of this chapter.
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“Homesickness starts with food,” said Che Guevara, pining perhaps for the vast roasts of his native Argentina while they, men alone in the night in Sierra Maestra, spoke of war. For me, too, homesickness for Galicia had started with food even before I had been there. The fact is that my grandmother, in the big house at Aracata, where I got to know my first ghosts, had the delightful role of baker and she carried on even when she was already old and nearly blind, until the river flooded, ruined the oven and no one in the house felt like rebuilding it. But my grandmother’s vocation was so strong that when she could no longer make bread, she made hams. Delicious hams, though we children did not like them — children never like the novelties of adults — even though the flavor of that first taste has remained recorded forever on the memory of my palate. I never found it again in any of the many and various hams I ate later in any of my good or bad years until, by chance, I tasted — 40 years later, in Barcelona — an innocent slice of shoulder of pork.
— from the essay Watching the Rain in Galicia, included in Travelers’ Tales Guides: Spain, edited by Lucy McCauley -
I’ve been in all day and thought I wouldn’t have anything to post for One Word Sunday.
Until the Superbowl LVII Half-Time Show started.
Thanks to Travel with Intent for hosting the One Word Sunday Challenge.
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The February reading starts off with a roar.
Synopsis: How a famous poet’s daughter became a call girl and then a writer.
The narrator’s life is all over the place, but the tone is fierce. The call girl parts are never gratuitous.
After she re-connects with her father, her life begins to settle down. She moves in with a poet. Let me tell ya, it is positively heartwarming how taking classes from UCLA Extension turned this gal’s life around.
Our neighbor Lucero the bungalow queen collected rent, so she got a discount. She lived top center of the five bungalows, by the courtyard in the middle. Ricardo wrote, sitting on our hand-me-down love sofa with one leg missing. A Balzac book in its place. Lucero walked by in a pirate costume, another day as a bird with purple feathers coming out of her head. A flapper girl or a silk kimono, nothing underneath, for days when she was nude modeling.
— Strip, p. 174 -
My first introduction to the work of the late Santi Bose was at a gallery in Manila called Sining Kamalig. That’s where I saw the Blue Room. I begged my parents to give me the painting for my seventeenth birthday.
A few years later — surprise, surprise! — they bought the companion painting, the White Room, for me. I brought both paintings to California with me. They are among my most treasured possessions.
mixed media, early Santi Bose. Posting for Travel with Intent’s Six Word Saturday
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Began Hannah Sward’s memoir yesterday (postponing the reading of Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage). The fragmentary, episodic narrative is told in a child-like voice — works! It is deeply enthralling. The story oscillates between a father/poet who, when not running off to ashrams, reads his poetry in bookstores (impressive, though self isn’t sure how he makes a living) and a free-spirited mother in Florida who cycles between lovers and makes a living by selling tie-dyed shirts.
Baba, the new guru with the knotted beard, has inspired my dad to move across the continent to the Santa Cruz Mountains to live at his meditation center, Mount Madonna.
In the middle of winter we arrive at San Francisco Airport dressed in fur hats and wool scarves. A lady in a sari meets us. I don’t know if there will be other fourteen-year-olds.
I am given a Sanskrit name, Sumitra. It means ‘friends of all.’ Dad is Jai Per Kash. Even Alina and Alex can’t pronounce their new names. We have a cabin with an outhouse up a trail. The first night I stepped on a slug the size of a banana. Now in the night I pee in the bushes. We eat tofu with brown rice, no spices, homemade unsalted granola. I want sugar and meat and to go home.
This first Sunday we go down the mountain to Watsonville to chant and do laundry.
— Strip, a Memoir by Hannah Sward, p. 40 -
It appears self’s books have been available on kindle for a few years. She never knew!
Two of the four:
The cover of The Lost Language is a detail of a painting by the late, great Filipino artist Santiago Bose.
Kanlaon 