Independence Day and Environs

 

From Berkeley to Oakland

my wiggy circuit

never fails to provide

side-show and fireworks

 

A brilliant tree

towers over

the gate of eyes

outside the library

in Berkeley

 

 

Cloud face on Jupiter

 

X

The Man with X-Ray eyes

 

DEVO salutes Oakland

last stage Saturday

Mosswood Park

the Burger Boogaloo

 

 

 

Moonshine Devolution

marches on

Good-bye to all that

 

 

Sapphire

hybrid 27 % THC

 

 

Not without a lot of snags

Cannabis is legal

for the masses at last

 

 

 

RAY re-photos

 phantasmagoric photographs

 

 

At Berkeley Art Museum

 

Flying all the time

 

 

Sumi ink abstraction

the mind inquires after form

 

Light box rock

 

Ella Guru

 

 

DEVO

 salutes from the

newspaper rack

 

 

Drive-by journalism

 He has a huge Wizard head

in the back

 

Peering out of portholes

at the egregious traffic

 

With the exhortation to

RESIST!

 

 

The authoritarian

Big Cheeto-puss

long in senility

 

 

Seen amid

the "resistance"

the opposition party

 

A stand-alone sandwich board,

someone had knocked it over,

 I set it back up

out of fairness

 

 

 

 

I retired to Bongo burger

for a fresh carrot juice

to ponder everything

 

 

And homeward

drive-by captures

on the salty Telegraph bus

 

 

 

Big scene this weekend

John Waters intros

 DEVO's last live show...

foreversville?

 

 

 

I promised me

a Rose garden

 

 

And I intend to have it

until I'm planted myself

 

My life form will feed plants

and feed worms

in a blessed cycle

 

Hey baby

It's the Fourth of July

Baby take a walk outside

 

Buoy my spirit up

with inflatable flags

I'm stocking up on stick matches

as long as Cannabis is go

 

 

Quite courtyard

outside my bathroom

New building

as yet uninhabited

They'll have clouds and gulls too

but not like mine

 

 

Late nightfall

the sky hurls past

slowly

 

 

 

Night flight take-off

 

 

 

No pyrotechnics

were visible,

just three hours

of constant explosions

 

 

The Moon

so constant

so self-contained

 

 

 

 

 

 

June-July 2018

 

 

 

 

 

Circling Berkeley: New BAAM* Exhibit

Nice brushwork

from gone times

So

another edifying not to say a little ho hum

visit to the East Bay's premier art edifice

Through the orange stair well

Wild incoherent

letters as art

Metal cast letters

spell nada though

This was a printing plant

where the UN charter was printed

Nice velocity

A contemporary

language tablet

recalling cuneiform

writing

The floor

is extraordinary

huge stone slabs

with joins

Invisible Man

Frankly, I had expected

a more substantial show

What was here was interesting

but it wasn't very much,

A single typographic work

by a remarkable

modern artist

say Jasper Johns

might have saved it

Ah, the glories

of Penmanship

There's a lost

language

Next we enter

a decidedly more tawdry

realm

Mondo Primitivo

Martin Wong

New York street artist

finally makes it over

20 years after his death

Asian Puerto Rican

and queer

he nets a vast

sprawling retrospective

Not entirely without

signs of his subjective

astronomy

and bookishness

The street worn

as a badge

full-size

In contrast to

his predominant tendency

to go fantastic

beyond the baroque

Life-size street life

has an undertow

Rent free

loss of freedom

can follow on

Where one presumes

on finds a great deal

of time on one's hands

You go rococo

on yourself

Sometimes

masturbatory introspection

 leads to phallus worship

It's all a bit

visceral

for my taste

In addition to Wong's show,

 and the Asian art

in the letters and type show,

there was a show by

painter named Ito,

the PFA hallway exhibition

of Chinese film posters

and the permanent

Buddhist gallery

*

Back out again
the way we came in

through the

David Lynch passage

* Reflects proposed name change to
Berkeley Asian Art Museum


5 October 2017