journal entry

inca trail journal

in ,

sacred valley, peru
18-21 may, 2023

I keep thinking of hiking over the uneven stones half eaten by the jungle & thousands of individual feet. A path laid into the sides of mountains & etched through caves & over leaning bridges. What a place to have been.

Starting in a lush valley then continuing up up up above the treeline to the bright beating sun of the alpine with its sharp air & soothing breezes.

Then down again to alpine valleys, freezing overnight but you can still hear the distant music of the jungle as the sun sets behind the mountains. An explosion of stars.

Finally down into the Amazon with the thick foliage stacked on top of each other, all different shapes growing out of the rock & between the uneven stairs carved around them. The bird calls. The chorus of insects & frogs singing all night long.

The final push up slick jungle stairs rising vertically into the clouds. The locals call them "Gringo Killers" & I climb them using all of my limbs for balance.

Then, finally, the Sun Gate. High in the mountains perched hanging over the jungle. Sometimes this is your first glimpse of Machu Picchu, but on our Sunday morning the mist & clouds hung to the mountains like a white sheet in humid weather.

For the briefest of moments the mist rolls up, revealing the city & Huayna Picchu crowned in clouds. The hikers gathered around the Gate clap & cheer & then just as quickly the fog descends again.

The Sun Gate is the end of the Inca Trail but you're not there yet. You continue over the alternating smooth & jagged stones & through the mist & ruins until Machu Picchu finally reveals itself.

Huayna Picchu is always crowned in clouds it seems. Machu Picchu mountain is behind, & the city lays between these two sacred peaks. Machu Picchu the masculine protector & Huayna Picchu the feminine. The Inca viewed mountains as gods & holy places. As living things. They built into their natural form because they did not see themselves as the dominators of the land, in stark contrast to the colonizers who would shortly come to destroy them.

Machu Picchu city was abandoned in a rush to hide their most sacred places from the Spaniards who came to demolish them & slap a Catholic church on top – as happened in Cusco, once the capital of the Incan Empire. The plan to conceal worked, the city was hidden from outsiders for centuries.

 
 

summer in the desert

in ,

journal:

the heat hung in the air like a weight. when you step out into it a hush surrounds you. the creaking of ancient hills barely registering above the hot breeze brushing through desert shrub & cactus. the roads glisten with warmth & all the creatures slow down to linger in the shade.

the desert is teeming with life, but it is a slow life. a quiet one.

 
 

the impossibility of perfection

in , ,

journal:

this is the core of the digicam/lofi/camcorder appeal. everything in our world got so polished & perfect & flat; the pressure to look like a glossy magazine life got to be so much that these frankly shitty early devices became irresistible. you literally cannot produce perfect glossed over documentation with a 2004 point & shoot digital camera. it is actually impossible. so the pressure to attempt to do so is lifted entirely. it’s a liberation from the confines of perfection.

on wheat, by agnes martin, 1957

in ,

sitting in front of “wheat”

it’s mesmerizing. like a golden field stretched out for a thousand miles on a clear warm day—but not too hot. the kind of day when there’s a breeze that prickles your skin but you don’t go inside to get your jacket.

at first the grey border looks like one shade as you’re drawn into the fields of wheat, but after a moment you realise its two types of grey fringing the field like vaseline on a camera lens. it pushes you in.

wheat whispers to you so quietly that at first you’re not sure if its a voice or a gust through the tree branches. but it is a voice & you can barely make out what it’s saying. maybe the words don’t matter? maybe they don’t have any meaning anyway.

a woman comes into the gallery & stands in front of wheat. perfectly centered. the center column rises from her like steam.

she’s enveloped in yellows like a goddess or the painting of one, with a delicate shimmering halo.

is this what agnes wanted us to do? daydream into her paintings?

six paintings by agnes martin at sf moma

in ,

sitting in a seven sided room at the san francisco museum of modern art.

you can’t photograph these, your picture looks like a solid canvas with nothing special about it.

it’s easy to walk by quickly & not really look. I see several people do that, from older couples to teens with dyed hair. they’re missing it & they don’t even know it because they don’t take the time to look. there’s a cultural comment in that, it’s a sign of the times maybe.

so many people don’t get it. the order found in chaos. it’s comforting if you let it be. it’s soothing. & when you get close to it you start to see the chaos creeping out… trickling out… a faucet that’s started to drip.

the grids are bursting at the seams but if you’re not close enough you’d never even know.

it kind of makes me sad the number of people who won’t even come into the gallery to look. I think they’re afraid of the silence… or maybe I’m being pretentious. but these are paintings you have to look at, right now, & you can’t take their picture & bring them with you. they aren’t bite sized.

there's texture to the paint too… the whisper of agnes’ voice.

the edges aren’t sharp—but dreamlike—it all starts to roll together.

notes on joan mitchell

in ,

some notes taken at the joan mitchell exhibition at san francisco museum of modern art

“this is a tree. I mean, it’s my idea of a tree which has nothing to do with a real tree.”
— joan mitchell

evenings on 73rd street

the orange is funny. 73rd street always felt brown to me. or a kind of grey brown like the fur on a real world-hardened squirrel.

maybe the gestures are hints at the people crowding the streets? the colours of their clothing flashing between buildings.

the red fits, but the orange I can’t quite make sense of. especially the one jagged hook in the center…like the men catching fish off the pier where I was walking this morning.

mud time

the violet pushes out here, like a secret being revealed or the first hours of dawn when the sun hasn’t made it quite over the horizon.

mud time like the stuff that caked my shoes as I trudged around le mont saint michel, the tide sliding in, claywet.

the clay is there too—that slick french clay that holds you like glue. your shoes almost pull off as you yank your foot free. the sound it makes… something like a slit throat.

that’s what the greens here are. the earth trying to swallow you back up.

untitled, 1961

“she risked the painting collapsing into unsightly chaos”

vétheuil

two people, one devouring the other.

OR

leaning down to kiss.

incredible how often those things overlap… or are even the same.

salut tom (for tom hess)

the yellow is almost warm but in a reserved kind of way. like when spring has sprouted but winter chill hangs on.

memory

nostalgia

sadness

la vie en rose

when you try to be relaxed but there’s that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach.

on night sea, by agnes martin, 1963

in ,

sitting in front of “night sea”

it is completely different in person. it doesn’t even look like the pictures on the internet.

the gold leaf literally sparkles, but the line is so fine you have to lean in close to see it. it has to catch the light.

& it’s not blue! it’s more turquoise, but not a steady shade. each individual rectangle has a gradient from deep turquoise to deep ocean blue. the lines start to shift as you look at it. they start to trick you. & this is how you’re pulled in, like quicksand in slow motion.

& you can see her. where the lines don’t quite match up or reach the edges of the canvas. that’s where agnes lives.

it stands out for its depth. the way I feel sometimes when I cross a bridge & a voice says “jump”.

night sea undulates the way the ocean does when there’s not a shoreline in sight. it feels like floating on your back & you just dip your ears below the water. sound becomes just a suggestion. you’re in a different world now. do you have a body? does it matter? maybe you & your body are the same thing as the water. maybe there’s no grid where your body ends & the water begins.

on joan

in

23 december 2021 - journal

rain.

joan didion died today.

I ordered two of her books.

the cats work up at 3 am running & jumping through the apartment.

it's the kind of grey morning that hangs in the air. everything is dim — its foreign to LA. the city wears it awkwardly. like an ill-fitting coat.

it’s quiet. almost feels like a town. the cars hum at a lower decibel — more space between them — like when molecules slow down & spread out. maybe you can find something in the spaces. like she did.

I turn my little heater on & the rush of its fan soothes me. the sun is up but you can’t see it. it’s hidden. a lot of things are that way.

lake hollywood

in , , ,

hollywood reservoir drawing, 2021

lake hollywood reservoir, also known as simply hollywood reservoir, is located in the hollywood hills in the santa monica mountains.

the reservoir is created by mulholland damn, which was built in 1924 by the los angeles department of water & power. it holds a maximum of 2.5 billion gallons of water, but since 1931 has been kept permanently lowered to a maximum of approximately 1.3 billion gallons. its deepest point is 183 feet.

william mulholland, the dam’s namesake, was an irish american civil engineer & the head of the department of water & power in los angeles. he was the engineer behind several dam projects throughout the state, & he even consulted on nevada’s hoover damn. he was the chief engineer of the los angeles aqueduct, which met with rebellion in owens valley in 1924. there were several attempts to sabotage the aqueduct by local area farmers & ranchers in a period known as the “california water wars”. the rebellion ended, however, with the collapse of the local county bank in 1927.

mulholland was haunted for much of his life by the st. francis dam collapse of 1928. just 12 hours after he & his assistant examined the completed dam it failed, sending 12.4 billion gallons of water in a wall 140 feet high & at speeds of up to 18 miles per hour, rushing into the scattered towns below. the water eventually spilled into the pacific ocean 54 miles from its point of origin. mulholland took full responsibility for the collapse & retired 9 months later. at least 431 people died.

the inquest recommended mulholland not be held criminally liable for the disaster, though in some of his testimony he stated: “whether it is good or bad, don't blame anyone else, you just fasten it on me. if there was an error in human judgment, I was the human, I won't try to fasten it on anyone else.”

mulholland spent the remainder of his life in seclusion, dying in 1935 from a stroke. he is buried in the forest lawn memorial park cemetery in glendale, caifornia.