pseudopodium: Christina La Sala

Hotsy-Totsy favorite Curt Salada suggested further bean spillage vis-à-vis the movie project....

The Ichthyoid Syndrome (1999)
Directed by Ray Davis and Christina La Sala
Writing credits: Christina La Sala and Ray Davis
Genre: Horror
Tagline: The medium is the message. The message is: I don't like you.
User comments: It seemed to really click with my subconscious.
Cast, verified as complete
Christina La Sala .... Company Spokesperson
Ray Davis .... Test Subject
Music by Ray Davis, with Ludwig von Beethoven
Cinematography by Ray Davis and Christina La Sala
Film editing by Ray Davis
Art direction: Christina La Sala
Costume design: Christina La Sala
Special effects: Christina La Sala
Production companies: Catseye Productions
Distributors: San Francisco Art Commission Gallery
Runtime: 3 1/2 minutes
Country: USA
Sound mix: Mono
Plot summary: When fish are used as input devices, a former technophobe goes wild for computers.
Memorable quotes: "We like to call them... Cuddlefish."
Release dates: Part of the "Facing Fear" group show, running from September 22 1999 through October 30 1999.
Technical specifications: With its Sorenson-compressed QuickTime file weighing in at about 40 meg, this little honey ain't gonna get much Web distribution!

Modern Art: Steven Elliott's and Christina La Sala's "Invisible Practices" installation has made SF State's Art Gallery over into a spacious windowless studio apartment for today's narcissistic Invisible Man, fully furnished with a "now you don't" business suit, a T-shirt for Casual Fridays, a bed, reading materials, inspirational wall hangings, and even a sandbox.

After the opening celebration, we settled down with La Sala at a noisy restaurant, ordered a lot of beer, and opened our note pad for an exclusive interview with the artist. A transcript follows:

Sierra Nevada?
No. Yes.
California part.
I went to Copperopolis.
No copper. Ghost town.
Not where invisible man came from.
C gets to proofread.
As long as I don't stand out.
Invis not part of body.
Nothing to do with body politics.
Clarify!
Not butter.
Times when it's good.
High-school.
Visible - bad things happen.
Elvisopoly.
[trade secrets]
Detergent - completely artificial.
Sneezing gasping wheezing.
Not nature.
Scotch tape, xerox.
6 + 4 is 12
More insulting to call it scottish tape.
Hop scottish.
Drinking game.
(looks like) notor Lielb
That's a good interview.

It sure is. It sure is....

The lights are strung up, Cholly's strung out, and the Club's finally got the true holiday merchandising spirit prancin' and dancin' and donnin' and blitzin' in The Hotsy Totsy Discount Warehouse Outlet:

To our left and right, we see samples of Christina La Sala's and Steven Elliott's Cootie Catchers, published by Chronicle Books. Perfect ice-breakers for the tasteful yet shy, these cunning hand-and-eye-developers are sure to replace Dan Savage and the Magic 8-Ball as your mystic advisor of choice.
Arthur Lee once asked, "Pictures and words: is this communicating?" Well, if he'd been talking about the pamphlets of Juliet Clark, we'd have to reply that they're even better than communicating! And at only $5 each, including postage, they're cheaper, too! Give three copies and their grateful recipient can shelve 'em under "Comix," "Memoirs," and "Small Press Collectibles" for easy access. The perfect stocking stuffer for those with large flat stockings.
Ray Davis's and Christina La Sala's much bruited about film The Ichthyoid Syndrome ("THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT OF OUR TIME!") is finally available for home entertainment centers. I'll ship a copy on a videotape or Zip disk at cost -- that's only 14 dollars! (Actually, it sounds like a lot to me, too, but that really is the cost, if you include the envelope and all.) Sure to be a collector's item, since normal people don't buy five-minute-long movies!

And Anselm Dovetonsils makes this ruggedly handsome offer: for every little magazine in which you publish one of his poems, he will pledge to provide a rave review of a book published by your small press -- and if you publish him in an anthology sold in real book stores, he guarantees that his review will appear in the New York Times! No other poet can match such a promise this late in the holiday season! Remember: Dovetonsils will not be undersold!

Special Anniversary Narcissism Week! (cont.): Secret Origins of the Hotsy Totsy Club

In an email interview for The Industry Standard (which I never saw, since it wasn't put on their website), Mark Frauenfelder asked, "Why do you keep a weblog?"

Like most of the writers I know, I want to be rewarded for being self-indulgent. This is the latest attempt.
The structural assumptions built into formal essays and short stories don't match what gives me the most pleasure in writing. House styles drive me nuts, and even when reviewers achieve a measure of stylistic and structural freedom, they're restricted topically. I offered to write a column called "You Kids Get Out of My Yard!" for GettingIt, but that, uh, didn't pan out. (More precisely, the editor laughed at me but still stood a drink.)
Finally, a couple of friends (Juliet Clark and Christina La Sala) suggested that I just start my own online magazine. I knew pretty much right away that it would take the weblog form, though I hadn't yet heard the term: I wanted frequent additions of mostly short pieces; I'd be providing most of the material, but I'd want other voices; there would be lots of linking, since a fair amount of what interests me is on the web and since I always begin research on the web.

Email to Fred Pyen:

All of which semi-coordinates with a decade's worth of wondering what this thing I'm doing is all about and wanting an excuse to drag more of those thoughts into print ("and out of my mind," as Daniel Johnston says). The Hotsy Totsy Club being just another attempt at doing "this thing I'm doing" more directly, after having published criticism and feeling sickish and having published fiction and feeling sickish.
Your "Is this the way I used to fall off this log?" is a pretty beautiful summing up of my "official publication" history.... But, yeah, inasmuch as I can come up with a no pressure form right now, the weblog is it. No economic pressures, therefore no care about numbers, therefore we can push offputting when we feel like putting off and push offshowing when we feel more like showing off and mostly we can just point offstage and say "No, over there!"

From the Generosity discussion group:

I specifically started the Hotsy Totsy Club (complete with dopey name) to escape questions of "responsibility to an audience," "working with the editor," "academic protocol," and so on, having previously run myself several fathoms into the ground on them. Not that I dislike audiences or editors or academics, some of my best friends etc., but for whatever reasons of personal neurosis such considerations were starting to keep my inchoate yearnings permanently inchoate. I like self-indulgence (when it's truly self-indulgence rather than a sleazy attempt at group flattery) and ephemera and overweening pretentiousness, but can't seem to handle long forms at present. In short, I'm trying for a self-indulgent ephemeral overweening pretentious bite-sized unprofessional mess, and, thanks to the web publishing model of low cost and wide distribution, I think I can get away with it for a while longer.
Kinda perverse, kinda oblique, but it's the one thing right now that I like doing-as-consumer that I can also do-as-producer....

Collage by Christina La Sala

Special Anniversary Narcissism Week! (concluded): Rooms for Improvement

Over the past year, I finished a long essay, collaborated on a short film, wrote some letters, and made a living. But mostly it's been Hotsy Totsy.

Over the next couple, it won't be too big a surprise if I finish some other essays I've been promising for years (on Patricia Highsmith, on Jean Eustache...) or months (on Barbara Comyns, on Karen Joy Fowler...), or even something unexpected. And I better make a living. But mostly I expect it to be Hotsy Totsy.

Well, if this is gonna be my standard watering hole, I got some suggestions to make to the proprietor, if he can rouse himself up from behind that 1.5L jug of Wild Turkey for a moment....

As previously noted, one of the goals for my topical-page-assembler script was discussion threading: folks would write me and then I'd thread their letters. It hasn't worked out: over time, I've gained more readers but they've become more passive. I want to keep editorial control, which is why there's not a "Forum" plugged into the page, but that assertion of control may be stifling conversation. Maybe also I've gotten shyer about quoting correspondents? Whichever, I get tired of hearing my own whiny voice alla time. Something must be done.
More music! More pictures! (Not more JavaScript and more Java. Twice a year's probably enough for that shit.) OK, for the former I have to cut deals and pay for more web space and for the latter I have to buy a Windows-usable graphics tablet. Everybody got trouble.
One of the storms that drove me into this dive was my frustration with fiction. But that's also one of the things I miss. About the only weblog I know that's experimenting with fiction is Once I noticed I was on fire, with its Robert-E.-Howard-meets-Tim-Powers alternate history scenarios. But what about dialog and incident? What about characters? What about sensitive poetic descriptions of landscapes? And all the other garbage I'd like to get rid of without putting it into a story? Because I don't trust story farther than I can throw it, and my noodle arms can't throw story very far....
And while we're on fiction, how about that paraliterary subgenre we call "real life"? How about a little more real life? Admittedly, I've been living in one place for a while now and, like most predators, I can't see anything that stands still for any appreciable amount of time. But I could always go travelling with a laptop.

take away the Cats

photo by Christina La Sala

The feral cats I saw in Tuscany and Umbria seemed unusually healthy and well-fed; several times I saw old ladies bringing food to a colony, and I was told that these gattare were funded by the state in gratitude for the cats' usefulness in plague prevention -- an explanation both quaint and sensible, but apparently not true, at least not in Rome.

From "The Cat in Law," North American Review, February, 1895, Gertrude B. Rolfe reporting:

"A certain citizen of Baltimore stole a fine Maltese cat from a neighbor, who had him arrested for theft. When the case came up for trial the prisoner's counsel entered the plea that it was impossible for anyone to steal a cat, as that animal is not property, and that to take forcible possession of a feline, even though it be a pet one and wear a ribbon and answer to its name, is not a legal offence. The judge held this argument to be good, and the Attorney-General, to whom the case was appealed, agreed with him. The latter in his formal opininon, declares that the cat is really nothing but a wild animal, that it is of no use to man, and that the taking of a cat without the consent of its owner is not an indictable offence."

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Old Style New Yorker Typo Corner:

"Here," the Israeli veterinarian added, "the situation is the opposite, because the reservoirs for rabbis are the wolves, jackals and hyenas." - San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want....

Is there one who understands me?

Thanks to Aaron for becoming the second person to notice that I'm Cordelia.

The first person was Christina La Sala, who tried to get me to watch Buffy back in 1997 by playing up that Thalia Menninger angle. But in those early days I was very shallow and thought the show was simply not presentable. I only really became part of the gang in the third season -- which is still my favorite, although the most recent one might've supplanted it in my affection if they hadn't transplanted the ridiculous Magic-Is-My-Anti-Drug plotline from some hell-dimension version of Buffy onto the shoulders of the Real Life show -- and only very recently and while losing all my viewers have I started getting migraines and pregnant and mature and stuff.

Also, I Am Most Like Bubbles.

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Errata: One who should know assures us that, despite our evident admiration for Cordelia, we are not in fact ourselves Cordelia.

We are instead 50% Anya, 20% Willow, 15% Imperfectly-Supressed-Bad-Willow-Confronting-Giles, and 15% Xander-Driving-the-Dream-Van-with-Willow-and-Tara-in-Back.

We regret any inconvenience.

Christina La Sala and "Petrified Forest"

May 8th - June 5th, 2009
ampersand international arts
1001 Tennessee Street (at 20th. St.)
San Francisco, California 94107

In writing, it's called "a strong voice." Across materials, across moods, a sense of continuous engagement with another. Maybe not quite the human being you meet at the reception, the reading, or the party, but not a pose or a persona, no formula. Something wholer than that, someone you recognize when you enter the room.

In the voice of Christina La Sala, there's wit and inwit, with no hint of smirk. There's painstaking elegance, insisting on beauty even in shabbiness and loss. Art is what this voice does, and making art is necessarily making do.

There's a sort of dyslexic synesthesia, modal wires crossing at a dreamlike concept both reasonable and uncanny: Braille chewing gum, for example. ("'Well, I've tried to say How doth the little busy bee, but it all came different!' Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.")

There's a poised sense of confrontation: a dare to make the first move, to cross this line, tip this balance, pop the bubble, eat me, shatter me.... We're being asked, I think, to make a decision: to consume and have done, or to live with the experience. To live at all is to live with one's decisions and actions and circumstances.

Which is to live with one's art. The least escapist of artists, La Sala affirms without flurry or bluster, but hour by hour, week by week, over what Louis Zukofsky called "a poem of a life": the work of a life in work. Duration itself becomes preoccupation: the times that bind, as in the obsessive stitching of La Sala's "Stay Awake" bedsheet, with its dare to fall asleep.

When these characteristics coincide, there's nothing anecdotal about the result, but we're tempted to narrate, to put this perplexing artifact in its place in some known story. The voice resists us. The Rapunzel-length hair-and-steel-wool braid of La Sala's "Straw into Gold," for example, intertwines aging's fairy-tale transmutation of brown-to-gray with our age's science-fiction transmutation of organism-to-machine. Its weave is clean; the tangle is in the yarns we spin.

A return to glasswork after many years, "Petrified Forest" carries La Sala's voice at its strongest. In writing, it would be called a serial poem, a unified work made up of sets of paired individual works:

There's a row of large glass panels etched with various patterns — floral garlands, diamonds diamonded, curved boxes, pinstripes — made more elaborately decorative by shadow-play as each leans against the wall from a painted wooden platform — which, in turn, has been marred by carved tally marks.

There's a column of squat glass strips, smeared by tally marks, as if by a fingertip dipped in acid. Each bar is held flush close against the wall; the shadows turn them into a trompe l'oeil of greasy icicles or streaked unguents.

Naturally, I'm tempted into narrative. I recognized one pattern from gift wrap or wallpaper of my childhood, and then I thought of cargo cults and Renaissance reliquaries: how the fragmented kitsch of one culture, after everything falls apart, inspires the high craft of another culture. And a prisoner in the ivory tower leaves marks which, preserved and honored after everything falls apart again, become reproduced in their turn. As Alan Squire said in The Petrified Forest, "I've formed a theory about that that would interest you. It's the graveyard of the civilization that's shot from under us."

But my ramshackle construction, full of plot-holes, hardly matches the piece's confident coherence. Perhaps I should be thinking instead of natural history and microbiological cultures: a science museum with brittle slabs impressed by ancient ferns, flowers, floods, and crystals, and with slide mounts demonstrating, oh, the effects of antibiotics?

But that hardly conveys the piece's aggression, humor, and endurance. I might as well take the etymological approach: Arizona's fossilized trees are extinct members of a botanical family that includes the Chilean monkey-puzzle tree, named Araucariaceae for the Arauco people who live in the region. "Contrary to popular belief, the Quechua word awqa 'rebel, enemy', is probably not the root of araucano: the latter is more likely derived from the placename rag ko 'clayey water'." Yes, clear as mud.

Or maybe it's best if I pass this to the strong voice of Alice Notley, a poet born in Bisbee, Arizona, about 300 miles south of Petrified Forest National Park:

"	This is distinction, says a voice, Your features are etched in ice so everyone can see them"

"	Poverty much maligned but beautiful has resulted in smaller houses replete with mysteries"

"	there's the desert beyond them that I try to keep housed from no thin flesh there no coursing fluid no thought"

Responses

I am eagerly awaiting the future retrospective or permanent wing to be entitled The La Sala Room. Not that it's any of my beeswax, as it were.

Copyright to contributed work and quoted correspondence remains with the original authors.
Public domain work remains in the public domain.
All other material: Copyright 2015 Ray Davis.