tea-time

by Paul Octavious (thank you Stella)

a poem for the new year

No Longer at Sea
I was at sea for four days
(or ten years depending on how you count)

the ocean swelling and folding over itself
swallowing serenity and trading stillness for terror
the winds enough to carry you even without your sails amast

I swam with sea turtles and nurse sharks
which everyone says are harmless
but a name is still a name

On an island I met a man named Righteous
which is funny
because he's always in jail
he was clearing a road
in his prison garb

and I thought of you
and I thought of you
and I looked for the Big Dipper and her little friend
and I found Orion's Belt
and there were so many stars
and I thought of you

after the storm

I just watched this video and I really liked it.

"... como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si..."

This piece premiered in Wuppertal in June 2009. It was the final piece Pina Bausch created.

I remember feeling so much grief when Pina passed away (also in 2009). I wrote on here about it, it was the same week Dorrit Hoffleit (astronomer) passed. Tonight I saw Danztheater Wuppertal perform Pina's final piece at BAM. It was revelatory. It was the most minimal set of any of her work that I've seen live, though of course the design was very considered and simple and powerful. (It was a vast white floor that periodically, surreptitiously, broke apart like land masses turning to islands. Plate tectonics. Swaths of splintered darkness amidst the light.) Also, her sense of humor. She makes me laugh so much.
And the most beautiful women. In gowns but with their hair down-- and all that that suggests.
The piece began and ended with a woman on all fours. Down stage right at a 45 degree angle. Her hair cascading over the back of her head and falling on the floor. Men came and lifted her, working together they maintained her exact position even as she was over their heads. The only difference was whenever they lifted her she would bark like a dog. When she returned to the floor, she was silent and placid again. Pina consistently achieves my favorite possibilities of performance:
- evoking giant themes (the need for love, for intimacy, for emotional security, for freedom) with the lightest touch
- the sense of 'losing' your mind, of elevating the body, the spirit, the animal above the cerebral, the psychological
- humor in the most imaginative constructions
- communion/community

Thank you Pina. Always and forever.

clear tuesday morning

This day is many things to many people. It's crazy how so many of the past 11 years it has felt similarly crisp and suddenly fall-like. Blues skies and the tiniest nip to the air. Scarves for the first time. In 2001, it was the first day of school of my senior year in college. Ever since then, it has been a memorial day.

silent movie

Since I'm in California film is even more on my mind than usual. The 2-dimensional spectacle afforded by the car window speeding along freeways or winding through canyons and parks (one of the most common surnames for neighborhoods in LA) or even just stopped in traffic at all of these intersections of abutting and wildly divergent paths and populations-- it's no wonder so many people feel like filmmakers here. We are all gathered at the fountain of inspiration and every standstill is a potential frame in a future story. I love being in different cities because the physical geography of the place lays out like a map in my brain and my brain in turn shifts its own patterns and processes to mimic the shape of the city itself. I feel like my coding mechanisms shift from vertical orientations to wide and flat sprawls of information and memories and thoughts with pockets of room around them to breathe in. I sit in large rooms in large houses or hike in canyons with vistas stretching from mountains to the sea and without another human being in sight and the thoughts in my head un-stack each other too and the little thoughts that might have been towards the bottom of the pile, or maybe just kept being piled on top of, those thoughts can suddenly stretch out and unpack their insides and exist with all the space they need again. It feels expansive here. I feel expansive. Two of my film-world heroes passed away recently and I want to share a few details about them here. Chris Marker was an 'experimental' filmmaker-- experimental in the sense that he tried things that no one had ever tried before to marvelous and powerful effect and was a major force in modern cinema-- passed away yesterday in Paris. He was 91. His full obituary is here but my favorite part is at the end: "Mr. Marker gave one of his final interviews-- in 2008 to the French magazing Les Inrockuptibles-- through the virtual medium of Second Life. In response to a question about pseudonyms as masks, he said: "I'm much more pragmatic than that. I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, pronounceable in most languages, because I was very intent on traveling. No need to delve further." (He was 87 at the time of this quote.) His objective as an artist was to: "capture life in the process of becoming history." Another hero of mine, Andrew Sarris, passed away in June at the age of 83. I had the pleasure of taking Sarris' Modern Film class at Columbia where every Friday 10 or so of us would gather in the screening room at Dodge and make our way through great and sometimes obscure films from the likes of Bunuel, Rohmer, Resnais, Kurosawa, Varda and Godard. Each viewing would be followed by an animated conversation and we were tasked with writing a paper in response as well. Sarris was one of the first professors to offer encouragement about my attention to detail, or maybe his attention just made me feel more special than other professors because I admired him so much. He loved to provoke contentious debate in the class-- and was just as happy to hear how much somebody hated a film as how much they liked it. Like many of my favorite teachers and artists-- he seemed nostalgic for the late 50s - early 70s, when, I get the sense anyway, art mattered so much more to people. [From his NYT obituary:] “We were so gloriously contentious, everyone bitching at everyone,” Mr. Sarris recalled in a 2009 interview with The New York Times. “We all said some stupid things, but film seemed to matter so much. “Urgency” — his smile on this point was wistful — “seemed unavoidable.”

buffalo cherry

I love traveling. I'm sitting in the Buffalo airport, which is, you know... pretty glamourous. It feels exotic though. It feels like an Alexander Payne movie. As we were landing I was staring out the window and I was struck by all the windmills. Is that really what they're called? It seems so 'Don Quixote' and old-fashioned of a word. Anyway, the woman sitting next to me on the airplane must have noticed my intrigue because she said, "Wow, lot of 'em. Huh? Must be Wyoming County." I nodded, "Must be." It sounds right. Then she told me that she read somewhere the 20% of the wind in the world could power everything we need today in the whole world. That sounds interesting and good too. It might even be true. Anyway, this airport is called Buffalo/Niagara Falls and I was really hoping to see the falls from the plane. No dice on that front though. Just a lot of windmills. Tonight I go to a picnic in Chautauqua at the theater where I'm doing a play in July. Tomorrow is casting and then back to NYC for a couple weeks. I'm listening to this great song by Crystal Arnette's band Ladybird and looking at these images and feeling good and open and full. Once the musicians' instruments arrive on the carousel we will get in a van and make a road-trip and at the end of it there'll be hotdogs. Great day. Also, Erica had her twins since my last post. Congratulations Erica and Gabriel. And Milo and Katherine. You are going to have the best lives.