John Gallaher - Redondo Beach CA
I read last month at Redondo Beach, CA and Philip Martin was there with one of his cameras, and came away with some pictures. I had a great time.
Recently I did a google image search on my name and up popped the same picture over and over. It's a picture I don't like, so I'm posting these hoping they pop up next time. These are better.
John Gallaher (Action Shot: Reaching for Glasses)
John Gallaher (Between Poem Zen Meditation)
John Gallaher (Going Interactive)
John Gallaher (The Muses Like It When I Look Up & To The Left [That's Where The Ghosts Sit])
Here's a link to Philip Martin's flickr site:
posted by John Gallaher @ 5:31 AM
15 comments
15 Comments:
The first photo looks like your adjusting the mic in prep to say something really important. You hope. Or, making sure that pistol is still secured in the breast pocket of your jacket.
The second is post-import, but you've been interrupted by the peanut gallery, which you take as a heckling, and you're barely holding back the curse-spit. The background figure in full body plate armor suggests that you're the opener for a Renaissance festival, or the MC at a Medieval Times dinner and tournament.
The third: you're into it, but getting a bit tired. The t-shirt is out, you've partially undressed. "I'm getting a discount lunch out of this, right?" You've realized that you may have had to bring your own silverware, which you didn't.
In the fourth, the salt n' pepper haired man blurred in the foreground is eyeing you so intently, you're wondering if there aren't any ulterior motives. You're scanning the upper decks for any discreet post-autograph exits. When he asks you for your street address, you're going to need potions.
Oh wait, I'm projecting. That was my last reading. Sorry.
--Chris D.
Oops. I meant "options" at the end of the fourth paragraph, not "potions"... Actually, potions might be better.
--Chris D.
Yes, potions. One of the very best options.
One of those pockets, I think, held my rental car agreement. I like to keep that close.
Discount coffee!
Didn't Kent Johnson already have this series of photos taken back in 1995? With him, of course. And he also took them. He was also the audience, the building, and the street. If memory serves. Maybe something about the clouds as well?
-Pat Garrett
Not to change the subject (and those are impressive pics; I think I said somewhere that Gallaher looks like he should be starring in The Italian Job, or something, and I've had three gay friends write me about him, already, asking what I can tell them), but did anyone see the new de Luna poem under the post below, I think it is?
de Luna just won a big $10,000 writing award, by the way, just in time, apparently.
Regarding the action shot, there was an SNL sketch years ago, a commercial for an instructional video called "I'm a Handsome Actor."
The good news is that handsomeness is simply a matter of technique. One was to dramatically pull off your glasses before fixing your gaze and saying something especially important. I think the demo line was, "Good God—a meteor that size could destroy the entire earth!"
You've already got the glasses; perhaps this technique could make your next reading even more handsome.
Paul
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I think you look rather hot
adam strauss
Well, it was actually much cooler than I expected. Must have been the sea breeze.
Gary, you're right. I do need to update my blog photo. He's starting to look like someone I don't remember.
I can't quite tell: are you responding seriously or refusing the compliment? If hot was read as literal not the colloquialism that's hillarious/delightful! Or maybe one shld never refer to old pictures as hot?
adam s
Ok, wow, the bear story is sad: I hope there are plenty of berries etc where it is, as will it have the strength to hunt?
I am glad to see Stevens mentioned on a blog in ways not intended to more than less dismiss. He is so far from exhausted it's fantastic. I almost wish he were less canonical so that he might be read as being as fresh as he is. Is it just me or are some artists fallen out of favor precisely because they are so good, so that they are not really useful because at the "end of the day" one just learns that one is not as fabulous as his poems are and as poetry is implicitly marvelously egotistical--even poetry as kenosis--perhaps this just doesn't fly.
I am sure there are dozens of very vallid counter-arguments tio the above!
I don't know, but I think they were saying that the bear is going to do all right . . .
Stevens! Is he starting to get the brush off? Back in the 80s he was considered out of style, then he made a big comeback in the 90s and early 2000s. Sure. I don't have much insight into all of it, but I think all conversations are us talking about us, and we bring up or dismiss writers from the past as they support or deny our claims for ourselves. Maybe?
Well in terms of the poetry millieus I have ended up in he is little discussed--tho I do know (she is in my millieu) Sandra Simonds likes his work. I guess I just don't see him talked about like he is contemporary; and yah he is dead but I'd argue that if one can read your work you're contemporary; George Herbert and Tennyson, for example, are two of mine.
"The Anthology in Our Heads" one of the poets in the last generation described it as. Or the generation just prior to mine. I think I might not be part of the new generation now. I forget how the math works. In the common usage, there seems to be only room for two or three prior (dead for 50 years or so) poets at any given time. Recently, it seems that Spicer has perhaps taken one of those seats on the bus? Right next to Gertrude Stein, who seems to be doing well in her afterlife.
In much the way that NO ONE talks about William Bronk . . .
Did anyone ever discourse on Bronk?
Yep, Stein is doing well; as she should be: she was totally right to think of herself as a genius!
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