Lingerie Model Basketball and Ladyboy Poems

It's a strange thing to be gathered in a stately hotel on the first evening of a prestigious program for arts journalists and suddenly come across several dozen beautiful, scantily clad near-Amazonian goddesses playing hardcore street ball in the hotel gymnasium. At first I thought I was hallucinating, but several of my fellows saw the lingerie models as well. One of these fellows - a respectable southern gentleman who knows lobster from crayfish - swam by in an Olympic-sized pool with a lovely hovering view of downtown and confirmed the sighting. True, we had eaten in the same restaurant for dinner, but I hadn't ordered the mushrooms. That was enough to settle it for me. There are many, many photos of these women at the lingerie basketball website.

It is evening one, pre-evening if you like of the 2011 USC Annenberg Getty Arts Journalism fellowship, and already we are off to a weird and beautiful start. Tomorrow I will begin creating a digital map of the city of Angels using a series of electronic gee-gaws that even now connected to my tiny netbook, dumping digitally and threatening to explode the motherboard into a useless magnetic gumbo of ones and zeros. The Netbook was not designed for this level of multimedia, which is why I spent the day yesterday in the USC Digital Lab, auditing a course given by the amazing Matthew Lahey, who over the span of 2.5 hours instilled in me the skills needed to use Final Cut to complete my anticipated project. A few hours of tutoring afterwards with a former USC student and I feel confident that I'll be able to do what needs to be done.

Now all I need is a Macbook.

To this end, I once again offer to my friend Richard Deming "The Deal" - he knows what I'm talking about. Oh, he knows.


Which is as good a segue as any I suppose, because Richard Deming - a poet, philosopher & art critic whose work has appeared in such places as Sulfur, Field, Indiana Review, and The Nation, The Boston Review and Artforum - is also the Featured Poet at Eyewear, a very cool poetry blog. And the poem featured is one inspired by a photo I took years ago and blogged on this very blog.

This very photo, in fact:

Rick (I call him Rick, but you must call him Richard) loves this photo, and was quite possibly looking at this photo on his macbook as he wrote the poem "The Picture of JB in a Prospect of Ladyboys"

The picture was taken in Central Thailand in 2007 while on an expedition to find an ancient civilization of a graceful trans-gender kingdom that mysteriously only lasted one generation. At least I think that's what I was looking for. It was a crazy time.

Whoops! I have strayed far from the point of this entry, and I still haven't located my spare 16 gig micro SD card. I suspect I may have inhaled it by mistake, or perhaps some doomed attempt at memory expansion. Big things tomorrow, big things.

I leave you then with the first stanza of Richard Deming's The Picture of JB in a Prospect of Ladyboys. Full Work here. 

The Picture of JB in a Prospect of Ladyboys

(after John Ashbery after Andrew Marvell, for Joshua Brown)

I.
A hand holding a soda tremblesas some latent wish casts its lots.The generous arch of a penciled browbrings the gaze up close. Where else do
names choose their changeable places?And the one girl with an impossiblyslim waist faces the camera and smiles,while uneven skirts sway above the knees.
In this picture there’s no nearby gardenand everyone’s eyes are wide open.

Continue to Richard's poem at Eyewear