The Sour of the Now

There is no such thing as the present tense.

It is an illusion and delusion.

We mistake the present for a series of tableaux

Revealed through the sliding doors of the what was and the hope that we will be alive in a decade.

These two poles are the only true time. We are forever wedged and pulled

Between the unrealized dreams of youth and the undefined

Fate of the future. There is no Now and it has no Power.

A balloon ride over Catalonia in 1877 may have been experienced by

Only a handful but is present as we breath, our nostrils taking in the

Microscopic debris of pterodactyls and giving oxygen to 31^st century

Nieces and nephews granded to the 72^nd power.

We hear a bird, we see the milky outline of the moon in the early evening sky

And we are uncertain, unwilling to commit to whether this is reality or the dance

Of history and fate. Any lie, told carefully over time, will erase all that

Came before it and become reality.

Fever and Yellow Lights

Magnitude and solitude and cramped quarters a mile below.

A lonely gramophone pierced through the darkness and illuminated the dance. Anything could surely ease the shock of malaria and malice from some long lost mania imported on a fruit crate that danced all the way across the seven seas.

Sea salt and unskilled mules walking on gravel mixed with broken goblets. Anything you want so long as you never make a second trip to that lumpy buffet of so many mysterious platters.

Sister Ally is on the Silver Chief somewhere east of Winslow, snug in her berth with no thoughts of home or the idle menfolk she so gladly abandoned for a one way ticket west where she then planned to take the first ship she found upon arrival.

SEPIA SATURDAY: Shattering Bubbles of Time

Every moment is a bursting bubble of time, gone even as it happens.

This concept has fascinated me -- and Landron -- for a very long time. The Shattering of Time.

Nothing embodies this concept more than "A Trip Down Market Street", perhaps the most important film ever made in and about San Francisco.
I was pleased that 60 Minutes chose to feature it and the recent conclusion that it was not made in 1905 -- as was long assumed -- but in April 1906, likely days before the great earthquake and fire if not the day before. In 12 minutes of real time, we see people, buildings, vehicles and animals, many of which likely perished shortly after the film was made. The only familiar sites are the street itself and the ferry building in the distance that at first looks like a painted stage set and then becomes increasingly real as the camera nears.
It's at the ferry building, in the final minute of the film, that things become truly fascinating and the images are closer, more fleeting and transcendent. The man in the Eureka - California wagon appears for less than a doezen frames, but I find myself wanting to know his story.
The car driving erratically with a group of men in bowler hats equally fascinates me.
As we arrive at the end of Market and seem nearly to crash into the Ferry Building, men gawk and women seem to either sneer or demure. Who is the woman in the cape? The woman on the left seems equally dubious about being captured on camera.

Suddenly, this cheeky fellow on the right races in, seemingly aware that this is a chance to be caught for posterity but not aware of the fate facing him mere days or hours ahead.
Finally the cable car and the camera rest for a moment, but not the action. We see this trio of men standing near the ferry building's corner stone.

The camera is motionless, but the old man's long gray beard dances in the Pacific breezes. Just a few years earlier audiences were fascinated when they witnessed trees and grass blowing in the wind in films by the Lumiere brothers. The very concept of capturing the action of wind was completely revolutionary. Seeing this old man, the emotion of his eyes only faintly shadowed by the brim of his hat, I wonder if he could have been part of the gold rush less than 50 years earlier.

Finally the camera pauses, then rapidly pivots to give a reverse, westward view, the final miles of the continental U.S. before the Pacific. A sea of news boys jump and wave -- a joyful, sunny moment in the early 20th century spring sunlight. It's as if they are shouting "We were here!" across more than a century, and for a few seconds we are there with them, and then it's all gone. A bubble of time forever captured. People caught and unaware of tragedy looming. Joy pressed in a book forever, like dried flowers whose petals and colors we may distinguish, yet we'll never experience the exact aroma and freshness.

Each moment, already over just as it has begun. I don't know how many frames are in "A Trip Down Market Street" but I want to explore each one, champagne bubbles forever holding the moment in amber.

My Trip to London

My Trip to Cairo

My Trip to Las Vegas

My Trip to Paris This Afternoon

Young Louis Sullivan Visits 'Paris on the Pacific'

Master architect Louis Sullivan graduated from École des Beaux-Arts in the mid-1870s, greatly influenced by Michelangelo and his contemporaries. Not quite ready to return to Chicago, he took a time tripping graduation journey to 21st century San Francisco which he'd heard described as the "Paris on the Pacific" and was curious to see what school of temple building lodged here. As luck would have it, he landed in the Mission District, and his first view of the Million Fishes Gallery at 23rd and Bryant struck him as being a virile structure with appropriate proportions.Clean shaved, with closely cropped hair and sporting a dapper five-button coat, Sullivan fit in seamlessly as he ventured further west to the hipper parts of the Mission. For those who knew him as the bearded gentlemen of more juicy proportions when he reached his commercial and critical success in the 1880s and 1890s, he was a nearly unrecognizable artistic and could pass as just another sensitive youth whose hygiene was decidedly better than that of the skateboarders who lived in a century with far greatter access to indoor plumbing and organic grooming products.
His reaction to the designs in the Mission was mixed. Though sometimes seen as a highly romantic and dramatic architect of the Victorian era, he was forward thinking enough to admire sleek modern design that could look beyond the cliches of form and function, even if they were mobile.
Seeing the contemporary commerce nestled in the ground floors of larger towering temples of design, Sullivan recalled an essay on "how buildings learn" and thought of his own personal, physical human architecture, of how a smile line might become embedded but a beard might be removed, return and then be evicted quickly like an annoying, delinquent tenant.
As he wrapped up his tour and noticed the excess of tattoos on youths in the neighborhood, Sullivan reflected on organic architecture from this passage from his Ornament in Architecture: "It must be manifest that an ornamental design will be more beautiful if it seems a part of the surface or substance that receives it than if it looks 'stuck on,' so to speak. A little observation will lead one to see that in the former case there exists a peculiar sympathy between the ornament and the structure, which is absent in the latter. Both structure and ornament obviously benefit by this sympathy; each enhancing the value of the other. And this, I take it, is the preparatory basis of what may be called an organic system of ornamentation."

Louis Sullivan Visits the Century After Next (and Contributes to the Polka Dot Thursday Madness Theme)

In January of 1894, master architect Louis Sullivan sat looking out his office window at the sea of snowy white that gripped Chicago and echoed his broken, shivering heart. He could not fully grasp that his economic descent was already in progress, though some of his glorious jewel box banks would follow in the difficult years ahead when he was paid a mere pittance but he left behind brick hewed emeralds throughout the Midwest prairie that would long outlive him and restore his reputation as a genius.

The "Panic of 1893" the previous spring and summer had ended years of economic and construction boom of which Sullivan was the gleaming star. The dissolving of the stellar firm of Adler and Sullivan left him financially adrift. Unlike Mr. Adler, he lacked the business acumen to promote himself nor the audacity of his protegee Frank Lloyd Wright to so shamelessly extol his own genius.

Sullivan considered himself a poet, even if his medium was brick, steel and glass, sending soaring verses reaching to the heavens like hands grasping for insight and meaning. A poet like Sullivan had no interest in accounting and marketing but preferred to read and edit the works of his idol Walt Whitman to whom he wrote at least one gushing fan letter.

The master architect closes his eyes that mid-morning of 1894, summoning up his muses and guardians.
Within seconds he has left 19th Chicago and its snowy blast and has arrived in 2010, seated in the back garden of the Junkplex near the polka dot toad stools where he is received for tea by host Billy the Blunder Cat and the advisory board of Junk Thief Enterprises. "On behalf of the Junk Thief family, it is my pleasure to welcome you," Billy says, offering him a cup of Kalimpong Darjeeling tea.
"Why, Mr. Sullivan, you look a little distressed," one of the advisory board members notes. Though tiny and cute, the advisory board possess many amazing powers (as seen during this weekend's incident in Orange County), including the gift of insight and empathy.

Sullivan sighs, hanging his head. "Ah, it seems my life has become just a pursuit of money when all I care about is art and roses and beauty and poetry. I miss the summer roses of Chicago. It will be a good five months before I shall see them again. Even if I have enough money to eat, I am starving the beauty and nature."

Billy offers him a rose colored cup of tea and points to the sterling silver rose bush on the other side of the garden. "Come, come, Mr. Sullivan. We are hear to cheer you any time you need support. And remember beneath the snow, those rose bushes are taking deeper root as they rest and will make glorious blossoms soon."

Sullivan nods and then pulls out a letter he recently wrote to Walt Whitman. "Would you like to hear what I wrote?" he asks. "It speaks what dwells deep in my heart."
"Oh, yes, please do," say the advisory board and Billy.

Sullivan pulls the letter from his vest pocket and begins, explaining that his favorite poem in Leaves of Grass is "Sea-Drift", especially the section entitled "As I Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life"

"Dear Mr. Whitman," Sullivan reads. "I, too, 'have sweated through fog with linguists and contenders.' I, too, 'have pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair,' reaching for the basis of a virile and indigenous art. Thus I am enclosing a copy of my own poetic essay 'Inspiration,' because it is your opinion above all other opinions that I should most highly value. Signed, respectfully yours, Louis Henri Sullivan, Chicago, Illinois."

Sullivan puts down the letter, saying that more than any dean of architecture, he most admired Whitman whom he considered to be a fellow artist pursuing the same objectives but in a different field and was the distant soul mate he had forever pursued yet never met.

Unable to finish their cake, Billy and the advisory board dry their tears as they surround Sullivan in a warm embrace as all sing in unison:

Come said the Muse,
Sing me a song no poet has yet chanted
Sing me the universal

All, all for immortality
Love like the light silent wrapping all.
Nature's amelioration blessing all.
The blossoms, fruits of ages, orchards divine
and certain.
Forms, objects, growth, humanity, to spiritual
images ripening.

Is it a dream?
Nay but the lack of it the dream.
And failing it life's lore and wealth a dream,
And all the world a dream.

The Illustrated Adventures of Louis Sullivan

On the snowy afternoon of January 5, 1890, beloved local architect Louis Sullivan is having his portrait made at the photographic studio of Hesler and Associates of Chicago. Not only is Sullivan America's greatest architect, he has also been described as the windy city's most "bewitchingly bewildering bachelors".

He is noted for his beautifully twinkling dark eyes and a beard that the notorious tabloid Bachelor Boys Bonanza describes as being "pleasantly plush and pliant."

Suddenly the photographic session is interrupted by the entrance of a breathless, half naked bike messenger dressed as Mercury who announces, "Mr. Sullivan, I have been instructed to invite you 120 years into the future to the grand opening of the great-great-great-grandchild of your magnificent contribution to modernism, the Auditorium Building."

Though initially perplexed, Sullivan is too easily seduced by adventure not to respond and is soon on the Trans-Arabian Zephyr racing into the future and the Mideast.Sullivan, who 12 decades earlier created the tallest building in the world, has been asked to share his opinion of the latest holder of this somewhat dubious title casting its long shadow over Dubai. Just as Robert Oppenheimer came to regret his best known invention, Sullivan's eyes swell with tears and he coughs as he chokes back a hearty sob. Finally, as the architectural tabloids press him for an opinion on the Burj Khalifa, formerly known as the Burj Dubai, Sullivan finally offers succinctly but honestly, "Well, it's clearly of very juicy proportions."
The master architect is soon whisked to the building's elegantly appointed penthouse where Lulu Brobstein, the reported Perle Mesta of the Gulf is hosting one of her notorious parties filled with "perennial bachelors" who banter about art, politics and the latest innovations in shoe cream. Lulu's wrap around balcony boasts views of both the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. "On a clear day you can see from Dubai to Mumbai," Lulu cackles. Sullivan also notes that on a windy day, the top floor sways a good five feet in each direction, a clear reminder to him that any structure taller than the Woolworth Building is obscene excess. Though no stranger to such parties in 1890s Chicago and able to carry on an enlightened conversation about art and the grammar of ornamentation, Sullivan feels quite uncomfortable in this bevy of constructed socialites. He pretends not to hear comments about his "Edwardian ball pinching garb" and resists snarking back about how their suits remind him of elephantine drapes floating around the bloated torsos of unenlightened Buddhas.
This stale atmosphere soon tires Sullivan and he retreats to a notorious, abandoned mosque near the darkened waterfront. Here he encounters gentlemen more suiting to his taste and temperament, but he soon realizes their "gentlemanly" hesitation and inability to articulate the obvious is both tedious and fruitless.
Finally before making his way back to the Trans-Arabian Zephyr, Sullivan saunters into a waterfront saloon where the drinks and men are of more than juicy proportions. He admires the seamless towers of glass, thinking of structures devoid of a steel skeleton and able to enjoy their cool refreshment and intoxication yet still unable to embrace that towering monstrosity he was dragged here to pay homage to. Finishing his last drink and bidding adieu to his fellow bachelors, Sullivan realizes his proper place is back in the twilight of the 19th century,where he can peer ahead into the possibilities of modernism without having the endure all of its detours and mis-steps.Midway through the journey backwards, the Zephyr stops to refuel and offer figs and chai to its passengers. Sullivan spies something curious outside the window and then steps out to more closely examine this curious ritual. Why it is our own Junk Thief executive committee, worshiping a golden pig in front of an ornate Indochinese pagan shrine. At first a bit disturbed by such idolatry, Sullivan is soon struck by the elegant beauty of the shrine itself and joins the trio in their worship. But his prayer is soon interrupted as the Zephyr whistle blows and he is transported back to 1890 yet mildly aware of the impending arrival of the shattering of time.