my houseguest

John Grimes grew up in Key West where he was Tennessee Williams' paperboy. many years later I heard him in the orchestra of Lake George Opera for a performance of "Summer and Smoke."

John is a world-class musician   currently with Boston Baroque. we've been catching up on synchronicities. which also means dealing with ghosts which is a juggle of sad & happy.


with prickly pear cactus juice at Rancho de Chimayo 

John Grimes

I met the tympanist 32 summers ago after he'd performd George Crumb's setting of Lorca poems on the Kent State campus. he'll be arriving in a few hours for what I believe is his first Santa Fe visit. & strangely it's the Lorca summer here. with the new opera & city-wide events abt the Spaniard.

a nite at the opera

Barbara & Todd Moore came up from Albuquerque yesterday. after a pleasant repast at Zia Diner we went to the opera for a lecture in which Peter Sellars again spoke of opera as a collaborative art.

for me in that art form composer is auteur. if the music isn't there there's no life for the work.

Santa Fe Opera's premiere of "Aindamar" seems overproducd to me. Gronk's busy "set" (really just another mural)makes it difficult to focus on the performers. at only 75 minutes this one-act seems more a chamber piece to me & if I ever see it again I'd hope for fewer production values & more concentration on the music.

Larry Smith just sent this to me

Attention Small Publishers,
Book Artists, Zinesters


During the month of October-November an Exhibit of
Modern Micro-Publishing will Hang Out at Mac's Backs
Books on Coventry
as part of
the 2005 Celebration
'Poet d.a. levy and the Late 1960's
Cleveland Cultural Scene'




If You Want Your "little magazine" To Be Included in the Exhibit,
Please Send to Mac's Backs c/o Bree, 1820 Coventry Road,
Cleveland Heights, OH 44118

Books/Chapbooks/Broadsides/Zines/Bag-o-zines May Remark Upon d.a. levy, Cleveland, Then or Now, the Culture of Publishing, or May By Any Contemporary, Published Work. All Works will be Held at Mac's After the Exhibit for the Publisher to Retrieve.

Send Now! all books must arrive no later than September 20th.

googling the dead

I find faces
once so familiar
I slept
in their shadows

stuff

I had to delete comments on the Bel Geddes entry because some asshole postd spam there.

for something more gratifying: Kimberly Nichols is seeking xerox'd self-protraits for a grid project to be exhibitd next year. e-mail her (knichols@dc.rr.com) a 300 resolution image in jpg format.

Barbara Bel Geddes (1921-2005)

& Mr. Como too

in some ways William Como was the successor to Daniel Blum. he didn't produce books but his magazines were as vital in their day.

as a young man Como studied dance & tried his hand at Hollywood. in the late '40s he became an office boy at Dance Magazine   working his way up to editor. in the late '60s he began After Dark   which was calld "a national magazine of entertainment." like Blum before him   Como rarely found a picture of a young man wearing very little that he didn't like. this may have been the first mainstream magazine aimd at a gay audience. I first subscribd in early 1969. thruout the following decade all my friends read it. when poems of mine appeard in its pages in 1976 I had more response than I did from any of the little mags I'd been in.


1978 

thx again Mr. Blum

when I was 15 I wrote to Daniel Blum thanking him for his books. I'd discoverd them at Elyria Public Library & they opend up the histories of theater & film for me.

today Blum's books get short shrift from academics because they were heavier on illustration than text. but that's probably why so many fans of stage & screen found them irresistible.

& to my generation of gay men his books had a special significance. Blum had an eye for hot men. the less the costume the better the chances for an actor to be featurd in his pages. in A Pictorial History of the Silent Screen we're treatd to Doug Fairbanks' bare butt   Valentino's bulge   George O'Brien's chest. that book was pubishd when I was 10. 5 years later came A Pictorial History of the Talkies with its famous photos of John Payne in boxing trunks & Aldo Ray in a bathing suit.

lest one think Blum satisfies only my prurience allow me to note that his annuals -- Theater World & Screen World -- continue to be among my most-consultd reference works.

Blum has been dead for 42 years. I hope he got many letters like the one I wrote.

Ibrahim Ferrer (1927-2005)

aahhhhhhhhhhh

I rarely read poetry criticism. it's hard enough to try to keep up with poetry. but I found a line I like from Roger Pao :

"Nick Carbo's Her Ahs and Ohs is like chocolate cheesecake."

seeing double

Riva Yares Gallery is probably the best in town. its shows consistently are of quality. the current one   "Milton Avery: Connections Over Time"   is museum-worthy.

it consists of 48 pieces from 1920-1963. & it's strikingly hung. all the works are in pairs. for instance   "Still Life with Spoon" (c. 1929) is next to "Still Life with Bottles" (1944) which is a reworking of the earlier painting. not every pairing is that precise but each at least shares subject matter.

the paintings from the '50s & '60s are so sublime I wantd to sit on the gallery floor & simply feast. which is what I did a few years ago when Dennis Yares -- who runs the Santa Fe gallery -- mountd his Morris Louis show.

if you can't get here in the next 9 days to see this remarkable show it will travel a bit. in dec it'll be in Miami for Art Basel & then in feb it goes to Riva's Scottsdale gallery.


"Trees by Southern Sea" (1959) 

"Restoring Pasolini"

on his blog Doug Ireland posts a fuller version of his LA Weekly article on the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

must reading.

I miss Howard P. Vincent

perhaps because Jack & I mentiond him   Howard showd up in my dreams last nite.

I've already written abt the Melville scholar & one of my best teachers.

often I miss the dead. today I'm esp missing Howard.

Jack's back

/ 

it's been many a year since the readings at The Cellar on the Kent State campus. but pleasant memories of them came rushing back when Jack Ramey stoppd by for lunch with his lovely wife Nancy Rodgers.

fresh from his triumph reading Whitman at NYPL   Jack was paying his first visit to Santa Fe. as things seem to happen with folks of a certain age   the coversation often turnd to the past.

Jack's memory is much clearer than mine. The Cellar -- long gone -- was a black-box theater that opend in the bowels of the Music & Speech Building in 1964. the theater department used it most frequently & it was here that Dennis Deal producd his early musicals. monthly open readings were held there emcee'd by either Jake Leed or Mac Hassler. in 1965 d.a. levy joind us for a reading & the campus memorial to him was held there in late 1968.

it was endearing to share Jack's recollections of some of the readers at this nearly legendary venue:

Spud Boy (whose poems were often abt -- yup -- potatoes)

Patrick Cullie (who got great fun on playing a practical joke on the serious Howie Emmer)

Michael Glaser (who had a series of poems abt toilet paper he'd collectd on a trip to Europe)

Myrna Loy's centennial

. 

& some came naked

for the opening of its exhibition "The Naked Truth" Vienna's Leopold Museum gave free admission to those coming without habiliments.

can you imagine the uproar the biblebangers wd cause were such to happen here?

times change

for the first time in a while I went to a party yesterday. it was a potluck dinner/housewarming. it brought back memories of my Kent years when the house on Morris Rd was part hotel   part party center. any poet passing thru town knew he cd stay at my place. & social gatherings were frequent & often impromptu. once I'd just returnd from visiting my parents in Elyria for the day to discover the nite-blooming cereus was in spectacular blossom. so I calld up friends & voila: instant party.

in the past 5 or so years here it seems I've been aiming toward hermithood. as I grow older being social takes more work. my circle of friends in town is less than a handful.

today I'm beginning to clean house. next month marks a sort of return to my old role of host with more out-of-town guests than I've had in some time.

the men behind "Ainadamar"

/ 
this ayem I was off to the Lensic for a panel by the creative team behind SFO's Lorca opera which opens tonite.

composer Osvaldo Golijov seems a gentle quiet person on the outside but with seething passions running deep. he spoke of the layers of our minds.

librettist David Henry Hwang -- a sexy & funny man -- was attractd to Lorca because: "my art predicts my own life" as did the Spanaird's.

director Peter Sellars -- aging wunderkind with the electric hair -- drew enthusiastic applause when he condemnd the country's current political climate.

set designer Gronk who paintd the entire set himself describd his use of the imagery of seeds.

I don't see the piece for another 2 weeks but can't wait.


Hwang 

calld Dad

on his birthday.

he's quite the neighborhood charmer. so all his "girlfriends" are making a fuss. completely with Mom's approval.