Kaye Donachie The Epiphany 2002, oil on canvas

24. In Sacramento, one of the girls who stood vigil outside a Los Angeles courtroom waiting for her “father to be released” in 1969, makes headlines again six years later.  Charles Manson follower, Lynette Fromme, attempts to assassinate President Gerald Ford in a gesture that she claims is in defense of the Redwood Forest.
25. “I stood up and waved a gun (at Ford) for a reason,” Fromme says.  “I was so relieved not to have to shoot it, but, in truth, I came to get life.  Not just my life but clean air, healthy water and respect for creatures and creation.”
26. Does Fromme know that in Carbon Canyon Regional Park, 200 Redwood trees have been planted?  A Redwood forest right there in Orange County!
27. Orange County is best known throughout the world as the home of the original Disneyland (built over what were once orange groves and, before that, desert).  In 1975 the theme park celebrates its 20th anniversary, and in this year, as in the year before and the one after, miles and miles of Super-8 footage are shot in Disneyland.  Home movies that will later find a larger retro-hungry audience in future YouTube posts.  During this year, the park will see its first gang-related violence when three teens are shot.  All escape without serious injury.
28. This is also the year that Mark Frechette, famous for his role in the 1970 film Zabriskie Point, dies in a prison yard when a barbell with 150 pounds on it falls on his neck.  No foul play is suspected, though friends attest that the former actor was suffering severe depression.
29. At the premiere of Zabriskie Point, Frechette and his co-star Daria Halprin, expressed their disappointment: “Antonioni missed it completely,” Mark said.  “What comes over on the screen is a revolutionary Disneyland.  Antonioni has given us a lot of pretty pictures, but otherwise it’s a void – there’s no context, no feeling.”   Daria added, “I’m sure Antonioni believed in what he was doing, but he just doesn’t understand people – he didn’t give the characters enough room to be human.”
30. Frechette’s story is one of many that will preoccupy painter Kaye Donachie, especially his connections with the Fort Hill Commune.  Headed by the charismatic Lyman, Fort Hill was perhaps the first of such Manson-style personality cults short on dogma but strong on discipline and introspection.   Frechette and two other members of the commune attempted to rob a bank in 1973, which was how he wound up in the prison in Norfolk, Massachusetts where his life would end.
31. Some of the Manson Girls (Fromme included) will also find their way into Donachie’s paintings, bathed in yellow light and smiles.

Kaye Donachie EBB 2010, oil on canvas, 50.5 x 40.8 cm

Kaye Donachie Black and enduring separation 2012, oil on canvas, 41 x 30 cm

Kaye Donachie I am so multiple in nights 2005,
oil on canvas, 67 x 38.5 cm

Kaye Donachie Your untold dreams I love to see 2005, oil on canvas, 59.5 x 41.9 cm

Kaye Donachie And schemes of shadows were drifting by 2005, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 66.04 cm

Kaye Donachie Hobo’s Lament 2005, oil on canvas, 46 x 62 cm

Kaye Donachie Didn’t know what to leave behind 2005, oil on canvas, 66.8 x 76.84 cm

Kaye Donachie But in your eyes I see a sunbeam 2005, oil on canvas, 50.8 x 58.42 cm

Kaye Donachie Every mornin’ our love is reborn 2004, oil on canvas, 62.5 x 90 cm

Michelangelo Antonioni Zabriskie Point (film still) 1970, with Mark Frechette (l) and Daria Halprin (r)

detail shot of Sydney Cohen’s studio

Lately I’ve become obsessed with the paintings of Sydney Cohen, the Oakland-based artist who is also an adjunct painting/drawing professor at CCA. We met there last summer teaching painting  in the “Pre-College” program on the Oakland campus. Warm and unpretentious, we became fast friends commiserating about the joys and frustrations of teaching high-school students and connecting on interesting assignments. One of hers I particularly liked: “Make a dark painting. Now make that painting’s dreams.”

I quickly noticed that while she was generous in talking to (and about) her students, Sydney often shied away from talking about her own work or professional artistic experiences.  Researching her work online, I was amazed to find her work to be quite stunning. They were these small to medium-large brilliantly colorful layered abstractions of oblique lyrical structures and spaces; each one a mini-world of intuitive and playful decision-making. Both highly worked and loosely executed, reveling in a vivid liquidity of poured textures and buoyant shapes. But she didn’t exhibit them that often.

When I visited her paint-splattered studio, there must have been hundreds of paintings lying around and stacked in various states of finish.  Hers is the kind of beautifully messy painterly abstraction that I enjoy so much but see little of these days with many young abstract painters leaning towards a forced distance of restraint with barely-there gestures of thin paint and labored conceptualized emptiness. Sydney’s painting refreshingly loped and careened wildly through a complex network of  bright shapes and unhesitating gestures, pouring on layer after layer of strange color combinations into burrowing organic forms.

Why so deflective? It was like she was working in secret. Or perhaps like a great actor fraught with stage-fright, she’s just incredibly shy when it came to showing her work. Only a handful of people I know who knew her were aware of her paintings. My programming slot at Right Window Gallery in the Mission was approaching so I asked Sydney if she would like to do a show. I was afraid she would say no, but she thankfully accepted. It’s up through May.  To get to know her and her work better, I asked her some general questions and was delighted by the roundabout airiness of her answers.

Q: How would you describe your work?

A: Pillow forts to have sex in. All-you-can-eat ice cream. A preference for the most indirect path. My friend was telling me the other day about some greyhounds we saw at the dog park. She said their owner told her that they have special neuroses, either they stack dishes and things on top of the refrigerator when they’re left alone, or they take things down off the refrigerator and make stacks around the house. She couldn’t remember which.

Q: Is there an artist or artwork that particularly speaks to you?

A: Oh, so many. Michael Disfarmer, Japanese Ceramics, woodcuts from Ukio-e. We talked a little about Édouard Vuillard. I’m really into the drawings of Emma Strebel, I’ve gotten to see her draw since she was in middle school. She goes to NYU now. My aunt Bonnie makes paper from mushrooms. I really like shapes.

Q: What are some of your favorite color combinations?

A: Sometimes when I’m walking around, I feel like i drop into extra deep color vision, that my eyes are tuned right in to color. So much of the time we are not really seeing color. Our brains make composites of colors, deciding for us to not focus on color, more to just take in general impressions, so as to navigate in the world and not get hit by cars or walk into trees. One doesn’t need to be an artist to experience the sudden awareness of color, as if the world just got turned on or tuned in, and that it feels like an altered state, makes us realize it is not how we usually operate. Yet color is happening around us all the time.

I am loving grey and green at the end of the day, and I’m appreciating unusual combinations—orange and purple together, mixed blue and rust shadows. Some colors that I used to find so ugly can start to be really interesting. Oh my God, purple, I’m sorry I’ve been dissing you all these years.

Q: What might people not know about you?

A: I was an extra in a Bollywood film, I played a drug addict. It was a long time ago.

Q: Does anything else inform your work?

A: I really like the internet. I love being able to look something up and that links to something else i want to know about and that to something else. It is supposed to be re-wiring our brains to go only shallow, but wide is another kind of deep.

Q: What advice do you give most to your students?

A: You are a bear lost in a forest, and there is an old woman with long gray braids baking pies for you, and your job is to keep following the smell of pie. That’s your job—learning how to keep turning toward what is most delicious to you.

Sydney’s show “Some Other Need” is viewable through May at 992 Valencia St. in the right window of A.T.A. This Sunday (5/19/13) , there is an opening from 4-7pm. Go see it!

Trisha Donnelly, Tauba Auerbach, Alicia McCarthy, Xylor Jane, and others at Alicia McCarthy’s opening in Manhattan.

Sometimes in New York this thing happens – you are going out and suddenly you find yourself surrounded by folks you know from San Francisco. After a while you might pause, stare up at the sky and ask to nobody in particular, “Where are they all coming from?”

Even when you talk to complete strangers – if you talk with them long enough, chances are they know somebody you know from the Bay Area. This town can be an isolating place, so when it happens, it can be strangely reassuring.

Anyway, lately, I keep seeing people I know, sort of know and barely know from San Francisco.

In the booth at NADA with Aaron Harbour and Jackie Im of Et al. Works by Kate Bonner, Chris Hood, Andrew Chapman, and Adrianne Rubenstein.

This week, it was at the NADA (New Dealers Art Alliance) fair. I saw Aaron Harbour, Jackie Im, and Facundo Argañaraz, the proprietors of Et al., one of San Francisco’s newest galleries (not to be confused with ET AL., ETC. of Tokyo, et al projects of Brooklyn, or et al. and the rest (of it) from New Zealand). They showed a selection of sculptures and paintings and reportedly got a visit from the famous New York art critic Jerry Saltz.

Nearby I saw the Queen’s Nails booth with Bob Linder and Julio César Morales. Queen’s Nails always seemed less like a commercial gallery to me than a kind of anything-goes project space where artists could do whatever they wanted. In that sense then, it was a good surprise to see them representing at the art fair. The translation of risky art into sellable art is one tough one, but if it can be done, it can be done in New York.

Xylor Jane with Tauba Auerbach (Alicia McCarthy in the background) at Alicia McCarthy’s solo show at Jack Hanley’s gallery in Manhattan.

At the same time, just a few short blocks away Alicia McCarthy was having a solo show at Jack Hanley’s new gallery on the Lower East Side, which is where all the cool things are happening now in New York.

Her opening drew an impressive crowd. Tauba Auerbach was there as well as Xylor Jane, Trisha Donnelly, Christopher Garrett, Bill Jenkins, Sahar Khoury, Whitney Shaw, Carolyn Ryder Cooley, and many others that live or have lived in the Bay Area. Many were old friends or at least drinking buddies. In many ways it looked like a family reunion.

Bob Linder with Julio Morales at the Queen’s Nails booth. Works by Jonathan Runcio, Jason Kalogiros, and Bessma Khalaf.

Anyway, Auerbach and Jane are important practitioners of a kind of geometrical abstraction that is very popular today. But back in San Francisco, they were doing it ten years ago. So was Alicia McCarthy. From that perspective it was interesting to see them all together because they have followed their own personal and artistic paths and yet have remained friends throughout. The fact that those disparate paths all led to New York is amazing and cool, because it turns the trope of the ‘Old Boys’ Club’ on its head.

Matt Heckert, Kal Spelletich and Brian Goggin having a post-art opening meal at a Lower East Side night spot.

Speaking of the of the ‘Old Boys’ Club’,  just about a month ago another Bay Area artist, Kal Spelletich, was in town for a group show called Weird Science that got reviewed in the New York Times. He was here along with Matt Heckert, Brian Goggin, and Achenbach Foundation curator, author and all around raconteur,  Robert Flynn Johnson.

Like this past weekend it was also a Bay Area reunion – but from completely different social circles. At Weird Science, many people knew each other from Survival Research Labs, from RE/Search Publications and just from around the Bay. At that opening I also ran into Marshall Weber, the founder of Booklyn, as well as Bobby Neel Adams, who photographed most of the images for RE/Search Publications’ most famous book Modern Primitives.

Stephen Boyer reads from his new book “Parasite” at Williamsburg’s best book store, Spoonbill and Sugartown.

But you hardly need to seek out Bay Area folks because they seem to just pop up unexpectedly. For example, the other night I just happened to see former San Francisco poet Stephen Boyer reading at the one of the best book stores in New York – Spoonbill and Sugartown.

This book store, interestingly, is also a place I go specifically because they carry McSweeney’s books, the Believer, Maximum RocknRoll, and a variety of zines and catalogs including those about Xylor Jane, Chris Johanson, Barry Magee, Todd Hido, etc. Also – despite the terrible economy and the vanishing art scene there, it has somehow managed to stay open in the hipster dominated neighborhood of Williamsburg. It’s definitely the kind of place worth supporting.

Take away the clocks and you’d still have a complex, and maybe more mysterious, work.

See the north side of the Bay Bridge in an old film noir, before its current animated lights; we can’t not juxtapose it with a recollection of the current bridge, now with the light array. One of the clock’s basic units: world war once, as in “the war between now and what once was.”

The early morning hours are dominated by people being awakened over and over and over by alarm clocks—often being alarmed themselves because they’ve overslept—and they or the camera then turn to and gaze out of windows.

It’s a kind of narrative that involves cumulative repetition. It’s musical in that the downbeat is the appearance of the clock. The fill is human biological and cultural behavior, the making of a metanarrative that might be called “how/when/where we sleep.”

As in: This bit of narrative is over, and it’s marked by the appearance of a clock. Next chapter. And that chapter is a variation on the theme that all the other chapters have set out, just a little different, moving the story forward minutely, into the overall narrative, which is a Human Day, or rather a Human Day as told to us by Hollywood in real time in the twentieth century. Long and drawn out, obscure and tedious, addictive and sweet: an artificial life-form with a life expectancy of twenty-four hours.

Life happens when we are engaged and stops when we look at the clock.

A literary speed of sixty chapters an hour (actually more complex because some minutes have multiple sections, multiple clocks, like double time or triple time).

Marclay offers new ways to measure time: How long does it take to fill an ashtray with cigarette butts? How long does it take to make love until the partners cum simultaneously? A bathtub to fill then empty? A tulip to drop its first petal? A liquor bottle to empty, shot by shot (sic)?

The image of the clock is the foot hitting first base, safe. By the way, have you noticed time is passing, your life is passing, you’re soon going to be out at the plate? Time is a machine; a time machine is a monkey wrench.

The pulse of black and white then color is the dualism of past and future. Bette Davis in 1960 in b/w dials a call on the phone, and a young Latino in color in the twenty-first century answers.

You can walk through a doorway, but not you, someone else, probably a different gender, from a different era, will exit. Peter Sellers opens the fridge door, and a young woman peers in. When you turn and look at something, what you see will be across decades of time and space, and you will have become someone else.

It’s a study of social infrastructure: what do we do with what, and when? In this artwork, in the last century, we lit matches to light cigarette after cigarette, candle after candle, in an assembly line of quotidian living. The clock and the telephone wedded, next to each other like couples in bed, fetishes of time and space. Also: we’ve got a thousand lamps and light bulbs, record players and glasses of water. “This preoccupation with clocks makes me crazy!” someone actually says.

“We are traveling through time in a machine constructed for this very purpose,” says Rod Taylor, but we and the machine and the purpose are different than he thinks.

There is one audience, and we are all sitting in it, always, along with Woody Allen and Doris Day and everyone who has ever seen.

Screenshot from the _New Republic_

I almost spilled coffee on myself yesterday when I read this bombastic headline in the New Republic: “How Occupy Changed Contemporary Art.” Then I laughed out loud.

It’s just that I die inside a little bit more each time when I read yet another “art review” written by someone purporting to be an authority on the subject. While I understand the impulse to write sensational headlines to promote someone, it’s just too much to take when that gets mixed together with the Occupy Wall Street rhetoric.

Somehow the article, which was supposed to be a review about New York illustrator Molly Crabapple, morphed into an attempt to elevate her as an example of a new “vanguard” of Occupy artists who favor vague things like democracy, fairness, and sharing. The reviewer goes on to claim that her using Etsy and Kickstarter is proof she is the real deal.

Sure, I can understand the author’s enthusiasm for Crabapple, an attractive former nude model and illustrator, but it’s hardly necessary to oversell her by claiming she is an avant-garde artist. By doing so the author inadvertently seeks false validation, implying it’s not OK for a woman to work as a nude model and that an attractive woman can’t get respect unless such lavish claims are made on her behalf.

Molly Crabapple surpassed her Kickstarter goal by $34,799.

Besides, according to Fastcompany, she hardly needs such blustery advocacy, noting that “at 29, Crabapple is making six figures a year — and she has for the past three years.”

Not to mention the fact she already raised almost $65,000 through Kickstarter for the show being reviewed, and it all went to her, because it’s her project — not to “the cause,” whatever that is. Yet the conflation of her and Occupy implies that by supporting Crabapple, you are supporting Occupy.

But sadly, it looks like yet another blatant marketing scheme capitalizing on the brand built by anticapitalists. How’s that for irony?

Of course she perpetuates all this artspeak nonsense on her Kickstarter page: “Your support in this project will help me cover the cost of creating spectacular art that’s meant for everyone to enjoy. And help me do it without asking the permission of rich people. Because art is awesome. And big, splashy, gold-encrusted, glittering things are awesome. But so is populism. I want to see how they look together. ….While I’m making Shell Game, I want you with me.”

Shell Game? Is this a con? Forgive me if I am not impressed. Since when did rich people need to give anyone permission to make art? She’s raised $65,000, AND she’s selling these paintings for thousands of dollars each. No joke. This is a SHELL GAME!

And then there’s this praise-filled article (complete with photo spread) from a style blog about her that deserves to be quoted at length:
“… Molly lives a post-impressionist fantasy as a successful artist herself in a loft in NYC, that is replete with chandeliers, paper lanterns, burlesque postures, plumes, and art everywhere. When Molly is home painting and sketching her ‘hyper-detailed surrealist Victorian pictures,’ she is in an embroidered silk robe, gold and pearl Rococo slippers, and might be obsessing over a pair of Alexander McQueen Gilly booties etched with almost medieval knot-work. But when out and about, like a 19th-century painting, Molly is in hourglass silhouettes, crinolines, crocheted gloves, veiled head pieces and other arcane accessories.”

Before Zuccotti Park was raided and Occupy Wall Street was pushed out of Lower Manhattan, hundreds of posters and signs were made by anonymous artists, few of whom ever got any kind of compensation for their time or artwork.

While I would never begrudge another artist making a living or having success, the New Republic article never thought to question the obvious contradictory elements of this whole marketing strategy. While she is getting her moment in the sun (see the Rolling Stone article + flattering photo here), the truth is that she lives in Lower Manhattan and her career was well under way long before the Occupy movement began. Fastcompany also quotes her saying, “What you get in this world doesn’t come from how much you ‘cultivate your talent’ but how much you ‘cultivate your name.’”

So come on, New Republic, be honest, is she really an example of someone who has “changed contemporary art” by fighting for “the cause”? I just don’t see it. If anything, the artist is just reinforcing the idea that financial success = artistic success.

In reality I’d say 99% of the “art” that came out of Occupy is agitprop. There’s nothing wrong with that, but why not call it what it is?

Jan-Holger Mauss, _Wild Thing_ (catalogue detail), 2011; erasure on printed matter

Calder Yates

Compulsive activity comes in many forms: counting specific things (such as footsteps) or [counting things] in specific ways (by intervals of two). Doing other repetitive actions, often with atypical sensitivity to numbers or patterns. A parent once told me that compulsions are most common among children. They eventually grow out of it, she said.

Not so with Field Trip #3, an art event/tour/happening conducted by Sarah Hotchkiss and Carey Lin. The two founded Stairwells, their curatorial project that puts transitional spaces to use for exhibitions and performances. Field Trip #3, as the name suggests, denied the participants the adult-ness and cynicism normally associated with contemporary art.

Stairwells’s _Field Trip #3_; photo: Nick Almquist

For those who were able to RSVP for the field trip (the event reached capacity within hours of its announcement), we received an email genially, but mysteriously, asking us to arrive at the Lands End monument at 10 a.m., Sunday, February 10. The email had no other information. Upon arriving, we received an outdoor demonstration of San Francisco building codes for stairs, and a how-to for measuring step dimensions and tread quality. The short presentation illustrated urban designers’ and city planners’ compulsive awareness that goes into creating stairs, which allows the rest of us to mindlessly pass over them.

After the dry, good-natured demonstration, Sarah passed out hand-held tally counters — the clickers that allow easy, unthinking counting. “Guess the number of steps we will be taking on our tour of the Sutro Baths,” she said. We did. She recorded our answers. And off we went on an ambulatory adventure.

After the tour, over Capri Suns and oatmeal cookies, Sarah averaged the numbers on our clickers, determined whose guess came closest, and awarded the two winners one prize each. Hotchkiss and Lin resurrect a field trip’s sense of anticipation and liberation from the graves of our adult concerns. Counting steps and measuring distances, we deliberately stepped, Francis Alÿs-like, into the mundane.

In taking advantage of transitional and unconsidered spaces, Stairwells positions itself within a conversation on the politics of public space, mirroring much of Alÿs’s work. Alÿs will push a block of ice through Mexico City streets, or walk those same streets gripping a firearm in full view of the public, get arrested by the police, and reenact the same walk the very next day with the police’s help. Whereas Alÿs’s work contains a powerful social action component, Stairwells is much more playful in its projects. At times, I wonder if their playfulness in their Field Trips does them a disservice, too easily allowing participants to walk away thinking only, “That was fun.”

But as I found myself walking away from the Sutro Baths, I was considering the act of walking away, counting my steps, recognizing how high I lift my leg to climb stairs. Who knew that counting your steps could be a lightening experience rather than a compulsive drive?

 Calder Yates (b. 1985) lives and works in San Francisco. He received his BA from New College of Florida (Sarasota) in art and political science and is currently pursuing a dual degree — MFA in studio art and MA in visual and critical studies — at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He has worked for the NYC Office of Emergency Management; taught art therapy programming in hospital oncology units; and collaborated and danced with Club Lyfestile, a neon unitard–wearing dance group based in Philadelphia. He served a residency at Recology in 2012.

Hanna Liden, <i> Blown-Out Candles (graphite)</i>, 2010; pigment inks on canvas (click to enlarge)

12. On Saint Patrick’s Day, at Travis Air Force Base in California, an aircraft nicknamed the Hanoi Taxi lands with twenty POWs aboard.  There are more than four-hundred family members there to greet them, and journalists ready to capture the moment.  Slava Veder snaps the shot (at the bottom of this post) that brings this reunion home in a single image.  In the far left, Lt. Col. Robert Stirm has his back to the camera; his back to the war you could say.  In front of him, his fifteen-year-old daughter, Lorrie, rushes towards him with open arms, the rest of his family close behind.  Lorrie was nine when she last saw her Dad, who spent the last five years in an interment camp.  The photo will become a symbol of America’s desire to finally heal, and win a Pulitzer Prize.  As a symbol, it is deftly accurate, largely because the joy depicted in it, as the photo’s title A Burst of Joy suggests, is momentary.  The war continues, in Vietnam and at home.  Stirm’s wife, Loretta, had fallen out of love with her husband even before he was released.  Soon after this reunion, they part ways and she will remarry in ’74.  Every member of the family is given a copy of the award-winning photo, and they will each display it proudly, with the exception of the man whose back is to the photographer.  For all that the photo symbolizes to him, he cannot bear to look at it.
13. Some of my cloud dreams incorporated a sudden decent.  Sometimes I was still in the plane, plummeting like a rock back to earth, and other times I was simply free falling through a glowing fog, my body drifting like a feather.  The voices of the women I grew up with were there planning revolutions in the mist.
14. In an interview by Nate Lowman, Hanna Liden will talk about her shifts from Stockholm to London and from London to New York, “I felt paralyzed by the cynical London mentality.  During the day, I just watched movies I rented from the video store on Camden High Street, and at night I went to clubs and did Ecstasy.  No future in that.  So I moved to New York in 1998.  I remember being culturally shocked by American optimism.  Now I don’t notice it anymore.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hanna Liden,<i> Swamp Walkers</i>, 2004

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hanna Liden, <i>Death Upon a Black Horse </i>, 2003

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hanna Liden, <i>Blown-Out Candles (Black)</i>, 2010; pigment inks on canvas (click to enlarge)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hanna Liden,<i> Blown-Out Candles (Blood)</i>, 2010; pigment inks on canvas (click to enlarge)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Burst of Joy

I was walking on the grounds of the public library and it was that time of year when all the leaves turn different colors. Right then I decided to gather some of them, organize them, then walk away.

1. The measuring of time is fine-tuned in accuracy down to the leap-second, on New Year’s Day of this year. The epoch of this scale, however, goes back to midnight, January 1, 1970. The scale also measures time before 1970, but in negative numbers. At 15:30:08 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), on Saturday, December 4, in the year 292,277,026,596, 64-bit versions of the Unix time stamp will cease to work when they overflow the largest value that can be held in a signed 64-bit number. But long, long, long before that, the sun will reach out and swallow us whole.
   

   Elizabeth Zvonar, _We Come in Peace_, 2012; digital inkjet print of a handcut collage

    

2. Elizabeth Zvonar is born May 22, in Thunderbay, Ontario.
3. One day in the future, in an interview for Here and Elsewhere, Zvonar will say: “I once went to a number of future tellers to work out questions I had regarding the potential future of the Voyager I and Voyager II spacecrafts for a project I was making. In order to garner a reading, I derived an astrological birth chart for the space probes based on their launch time, date, and geographic location. I booked appointments with a tarot reader, a psychic, a dilettante astronomer, and a nutritionist healer who is planning to exit the matrix on a different kind of Voyager than I was there to inquire about, in the year 2018. However, he did have some interesting things to say. The thing I took from the nutritionist healer that I sometimes still think about is that he described how time operates by referencing a painting. He pointed to a figure in a landscape hanging on his office wall. He then said to focus in on a section of that painting, any tiny portion of it. This, he suggested, is a life. That painting is an entire life from beginning to end, and it’s happening simultaneously, all the time. We’re born, we grow up, we live a life and then we die, all at the same time. We’re only able to function by dealing with the tiny section we focus on at any given time.”
4. I (D-L Alvarez) love both my parents, though their own love for each other is more often fraught with differences than harmonious. They argue almost daily about things that seem trivial; however, one day when I am in my teens there will be a bout where Dad accuses Mom of having a lesbian affair. He won’t be the first to wonder about her sexuality. Mom is tough and travels in cliques of tough women, some of whom are indeed lesbian. My childhood is spent amongst tribes of politically minded, forward-thinking females. There’s the subcommittee of educators who are part of the Farm Workers’ Movement, the Nuns for Peace we sometimes camp with before going on marches that are too far from Stockton to sleep at home, the gossipy klatch that hangs out at the local woman-owed doughnut shop, and her old crew from when she was a meter deputy.  The only group she’s part of that is not exclusively female is the motorcycle club where she met Dad. This will be the case up until the early eighties, when she will join me in getting involved in the local community theater, thus widening her social circle to include gay men.
5. (But back to 1972.) Mom takes her first plane trip with her best friend, Dee Dee Blank. Dee Dee is one of Mom’s former coworkers as a meter deputy, as well as the friend who introduced her to the Port Stockton Motorcycle Club. They are plus-size women, both with a brash sense of humor and polyester stretch pants, happily married to biker-hubbies. But this vacation is a girls-only outing.
6. They go to Hawaii.
7. This same year, U.S. airlines begins mandatory inspection of passengers and baggage. Yep: before December 1972, you could walk directly from the ticket counter to the tarmac and onto the plane without being stopped. Which is exactly what Mom and Dee Dee do.
8. Dad, my younger brother, and I see them off from the small Stockton Airport.
9. A week later we return there to welcome them home. The trip also marked Mom’s first time in a plane. She talks about the flight more than she does about the tropical island, and her photographs reflect this skewed excitement: shot after shot of clouds taken from the airplane window. She retells the story so often that she makes it one of my memories. I start dreaming about looking down on clouds, and for years to come, on into my late teens, I will carry the memory with me of my first flight at age 7, when in truth I will not see the inside of a commercial plane until I am 23 and going to Europe for the first time.
10. From the same interview sited in paragraph 3 (above), Zvonar adds, “It’s a simple example that suggests a complex layering of possibility. I do wonder about how concrete time is, and I question the history we’re privy to based on the basic understanding that the loudest and strongest voices are often the bookkeepers. Published history is a by-product of the fittest’s ability to survive.”
11. Two days before the end of this year is the last flight for one commercial airline going from New York to Florida. It crashes down in the Everglades on a clear chilly night. The fiery burst is witnessed by some men out gigging bullfrogs.

Elizabeth Zvonar, _Channelling_, 2009; digital LightJet print of a handcut collage; 30 in. x 36 in. (click to enlarge)

Elizabeth Zvonar, _Proclivities_, 2009; digital LightJet print of a handcut collage; 15 in. x 22 in.

Elizabeth Zvonar, _I exist as an individual, separate from other people, with private thoughts. I also understand that other people are similarly self-aware. AKA Ballsy._, 2006; digital LightJet print of a handcut collage (click to enlarge)

Elizabeth Zvonar, _Two Faces, Part Human and Mostly Supernatural_,2007; digital LightJet print of a handcut collage

Elizabeth Zvonar, _La Futura_, 2010; digital LightJet print of a handcut collage (click to enlarge)

Elizabeth Zvonar, _Face_, 2010; digital LightJet print of a handcut collage