COKE WEED

http://cokeweed.com/

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Obsession: Tina Chow's Jewelry

"I like the idea of wearing very personal jewelry and not so much decoration."
--Tina Chow


What becomes a legend most?

For Tina Chow, legendary downtown darling, muse to artists such as Andy Warhol, the signature
statement pieces of her singular style came in the form of jewelry she designed in collaboration
with Shouchikudou Kosuge, a Japanese artisan.

These pieces, like Chow herself, possess an unconventional, hard beauty. Rose quartz is
wrapped in an intricate bamboo trellis; crystal amulets are wound with black string.

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Oh, to be a piece of Sicilian pottery

Giorgio Morandi. Bottiglie e Fruttiera. oil on canvas, 1916. collezzione Gianni Mattioli

Many blocks away from the piazza del Duomo,

which severs the industrious vein of Via Etnea, Catania’s most commercial street,

and farther away still from the infamous Fecarotta Brothers shop window,

which occupies one of Via Etnea’s prominent intersections,

I observe the morning overture of Via Umberto from my kitchen balcony.

As the waking hours dissipate and the coolness of dawn

is replaced by midday’s gleaming orange orb of light,

the streets of Via Umberto smolder into being.

Quotidian splendors unfurl beneath my eyes.

Across the street, bitter old men dressed in suits of heavy tweed line the stoops of the bus stop,

poised to resume querulous conversations with the occasional spurt of wind.

Helmeted riders stream by in their motorinos,

unleashing an acrid gurgle of petrol into the sultry morning breezes.

At the Vezzosi soda kiosk a cigarette dangles precariously from the slackened lips

of a man slicing oranges and lemons under a faded parasol.

The smoke disperses into the air.

His work finished, the apathetic attendant exits the scene,

leaving the cutting board populated with fruit.

The prospect of life, the very decision to take to the street, it seems,
is commandeered by the dizzying fragrance of lemons.

As I stir a plump yellow wedge in my black tea
the perfume of citrus splashes the walls of the kitchen parlor,
curling into the atmosphere and coloring it the same tawny serpentine
as the painted fractals that cluster on my signora’s ceramic bowls from Caltagirone.

-- from the Catania notebooks, circa March 2008

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In absentia: Apologies, the Church of Sant Apollonaire, and more musings on the mosaics of Ravenna

Astral light at the mausoleum of Galla Placidia

Ikonoklasm, via Sant'Apollinaire

"What is the force that sees the single parts, or which distinguishes the facts it knows? What is the force that gathers up the parts it has distinguished, that takes its course in order due, now rises to mingle with the things on high, and now sinks down among the things below, and then to itself brings back itself, and, so examining, refutes the false with truth? This is a cause of greater power, of more effective force by far than that which only receives the impressions of material bodies.

Yet does the passive reception come first, rousing and stirring all the strength of the mind in the living body When the eyes are smitten with a light, or the ears are struck with a voice's sound, then is the spirit's energy aroused, and, thus moved, calls upon like forms, such as it holds within itself, fits them to signs without and mingles the forms of its imagination with those which it has stored within....

--Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

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Nights in Connecticut.

Sitting in your chair, smoking your effetely rolled cigarette,
I see the image of the icy moon refracted
In the stolid waters gone black
And it is a solemn night in Connecticut
When only coyotes are killing.

Naturally, a full moon mines the passage
Envelopes our conversation in its dull supernal glow
And a small flame wicks itself
In the heat of exhaled smoke
The acrid curl of whiskey licking the throat
The heat of our young blood
On the night of the hunt.

In blood we are borne
The milk of that husky moon
And the dusky howl of the darkness that surrounds us.

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The Cliffs of Acitrezza

still, La Terra Trema, reg. Luchino Visconti

“Granita with Artist” is what surfaced from this moment of suspension. You “painted” it in the truest colors you knew, in a style that demanded no flighty interpretation. You appreciated the dual coldness of representation and title—the scarcity of color gave it an almost monochrome palette, drawn out from umbers and blacks, cadmium white, bluish-greys. The title framed the entire transaction for you, condensed the drive away from the dusty city, the façade of the small pink house, the adolescents splayed out on the sciara, into one extractable essence. The truth is that you didn’t even need the painting, and that is why you preserved the image in the living pigment of memory. The sciara still spoke to you in verses of slippery stone, in labile intonations. At times, you awoke feeling the grit of the granita on your tongue and the lingering bitterness of lemon rind. And even the jackal face of the artist surfaced periodically out of the ruins of the times when you knew each other.

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The remains of the day.

Thank you, unsphinxincompris, D.J.

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