Beige

$25.00

Bruna Mori and George Porcari
978-1-937357-81-8 (paper)
July 2019

 

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There is no wisdom of the banal, just the smell of bougainvillea. Beige is a long walk through the suburbs of San Diego and Gardena, places the authors lived when they first moved to California.

Bruna Mori is a writer and educator, preoccupied with spatial discourses. Born in Japan, she moved itinerantly, yet keeps landing back in the San Diego suburbs. Her books are Poetry for Corporations and Dérive . She has published excerpts, articles, essays and chapbooks widely, most recently in Tank Magazine, and taught poetics at art and design schools in Southern California including the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she received her own BA; her MFA was completed at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

George Porcari is an artist and photographer based in Los Angeles. Born in Peru, George emigrated to Gardena, California in the sixties and began his lifelong vocation in observing and documenting his surroundings. Porcari attended Pratt Institute and Art Center College of Design, where he has also taught film and collage history classes and worked as an acquisitions librarian for many years. He has exhibited internationally since 1988; his most recent solo exhibitions were at Haphazard Gallery, Tif’s Desk and China Art Objects. His numerous critical essays and other writings have appeared in CINEAction, NY arts, and Inflatable Magazine. He occasionally revisits the suburbs.

“Beige is the texture of stucco, the beach and the body shops, the early school shootings, the sound of the crickets, the new tracts of 5000 square-foot middle-class homes in east San Diego. Beige results from Porcari’s and Mori’s long friendship. The pulse of their book beats like a hummingbird’s heart.”
—Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

“Perhaps there’s no wisdom in the banal, but perhaps some wisdom in looking at the limits of wisdom, at beige as tonal standard, at things mute in their thingness—dreams of things, perhaps, things dreaming of themselves—that lie outside of ‘wisdom’. Bruna Mori conjures wit and wry tenderness in the interplay between her language and George Porcari’s full frontal quintessential Southern California landscapes. The last time you were asked your favorite color, you didn’t say this, but clearly more than we suspected, ‘Beige is fun.'”
—Sesshu Foster, author of City Terrace Field ManualBruna Mori