Older-kind

We finished our first rough cut tonight for a short film I wrote, directed, starred in, and have produced as well (I guess). It's a rough night.  Okay, rough is overstated - I have much to learn. I've been excited in the process, but I'm reminded of a recent interview I heard with Ira Glass talking about beginners, that most people don't stick through the part of making things where what you're making does not meet your taste level. Right now, I'm feeling that way.  It's still a rough cut. I don't know what will happen. I'm working on editing with someone who is really enjoying it, and we all are. It was fun to shoot, and it's been fun to work on.  I know I will push through. I hope it turns out to be something good.

We took out a shot of pigeons taking off from the ground. It just occurred to me that we should put it back in.

Communicating in any art from is challenging. I've never called myself an artist, as it feels a little high falutin to me, but I've always created. It's a deep impulse. I'm learning a new way. Creating drama in film is hard. I have years of working in the theater, so I know the drill with a play. About 3 weeks into a 4 week rehearsal process it all starts to fail. You get it on it's feet and it's a rickety house. Your body feels foreign, there is no rhythm, everyone despairs.  Then you add tech and it's under water again, and then you open and it somehow comes together.  I don't know this process in film. Perhaps there is a first cut depression.  I'll muscle through. I hope it's watchable.

Saturday I sat with a new friend who is a portrait photographer. We chatted for a couple hours while he took photos in his studio apartment. I got to see him practice his art, to wonderful results.  I enjoyed sitting, but realized how tired I was after, that it makes me a little tense. It's new to me.

I'm too old to be a wunderkind. I'm sad about that, but that ship has sailed. I'm hoping to be an older-kind.  So this is my first film. It's not my first piece of writing. If I keep doing this, in twenty years I could say I've been doing this for twenty years.  If I stop now I wouldn't be any kind of kind. Just the quitting kind, something unkind.  I'm hoping for resilience. I'm remembering that I'm learning.

I suppose it's apt my short is called "Under Construction."  I keep finding myself inadvertently in my titles.

Hearsay of the Soul

As I thought about writing a little today, a concurrent thought that I needed to clean my refrigerator happened.  I did make banana bread, but have held fast to writing about this.

We went to the Getty last weekend to see the Canterbury and St. Alban's exhibit, which was beautiful.  Eight century old glass and illuminated manuscripts.  Quite awe inspiring.  I also love the interactive portions of the exhibit, which instruct how stained glass and illuminated manuscripts are made. I am continually amazed by craft. I don't think I will ever tire of seeing how things are made.

We also stopped at the "Hearsay of the Soul"exhibit, which is a video installation by Werner Herzog of, well - I'll let the Getty website tell you:

Projected on three adjacent walls and eighteen minutes in length, the five-channel video combines selected landscape etchings by Hercules Segers (Dutch, about 1589–about 1638) with the contemporary avant-garde music of composer/cellist Ernst Reijseger (Dutch, born 1954). The juxtaposition of Segers's lush prints of enigmatic vistas with Reijseger's expressive and experimental music results in a richly layered work that is both intimate and epic.

Well, huh.  I read Herzog's introduction, hailing Segers as an outsider artist who was important to his (Herzog's) artistic development. Inside, what I thought about was not about Seger's outsider status, nor that I had not seen his work.  Mostly, my thoughts were about the challenge of communicating one's love for something.  On some level, I was watching an 18 minute video mix tape, in which Herzog was trying to communicate his appreciation for an artist.  What I got from the piece is how hard that is to do. 

I'm a big cheerleader. I'm a cyber sleeve-tugger, forever attempting to communicate my deep love or appreciation for something or other. I do it in life as well.  For instance, I recently teared up during a viewing of "Merrily We Roll Along" from London.  It never fails that if I am watching "Hair," I will start to sob during the "Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine In,"(maybe it's that I played the role. I don't know. I teared up linking to the video) and when the girl with brain damage tries to communicate to her beloved why she wilalways be broken and he should never love her in "Light in the Piazza," I'm a wreck (whoops, more teary linking).  I know, too, that those three works leave some people cold. It certainly doesn't stop me from trying.

I love many artists. I love Modigliani, for instance, and I'm a fan of Joni Mitchell.  Were I to create a video piece of these two artist juxtaposed to try to communicate my appreciation, you may or may not be moved. In the Herzog piece, for instance, I'm not a lover of landscapes. I don't usually respond to them.  Or to etchings.  I felt that he feels deeply about them, but I remain unmoved. I also get he's trying to create a third thing, a piece of his own. I don't want you to think I believe art has to move people; art can do what it wants and exists as it is.  I can't say what Herzog's intention was.  It did move me to ponder how challenging it is to communicate why we love something, although we continue to try. I love the attempt, though, whether I respond or not.  Someone will more than likely be moved or even curious.  I came away reminded of the ineffability of desire - that what touches us, what we hold dear, is as individual as the strokes in those etchings.  

Bookeywookey

While I'm figuring out what to say about stained glass from Canterbury and Werner Herzog at the Getty (I have a good idea, but did you ever take notes in the dark during a film? Results not always super-legible), take a look at my friend Ted's blog, Bookeywookey

Frankly, extraordinary. I've always enjoyed it, but his year end lists of what he's read each year are mind-blowing.  45 - 50 books a year, while also getting a PhD. How do people do it?  Really, I actually want to know.

Anyhow, I'm chipping away at the ones I've been chipping away at. Meanwhile, there's a great amount of ideas and recommendations awaiting you at Bookeywookey.

Enjoy.

Merrily We Roll Along

I saw this version of Merrily We Roll Along a couple of months ago. It was taped live on the West End, and was broadcast to theaters. I was blown away. The score is one of my favorites, but I'd heard it never really worked, as the story is told backwards.

The original production featured a bunch of younger actors including Jason Alexander, Lonny Price, and Jim Walton. The story centers on a group of three friends, and one in particular who has become a great success at the price of many people in his life. The students in the opening ask him how he got to where he was, and the story is his memory and reconstruction.

The director removed the frame of a graduation, and cast actors in their late 30s and early 40s who aged backwards, which is a wise choice.  The opening number includes an affair, alcoholism, and the dissolution of a marriage and lifelong friendship - no wonder it didn't work with twenty year-olds. The direction is flat out brilliant, as are the performances. This show has been fabled not to work, and this production does the exact opposite.

The music is amazing, including a perennial Sondheim favorite, "Not A Day Goes By", and my favorite "Our Time," which is included in this trailer.

Maybe I'm at the time of life where looking back and seeing an entire life and choices made effects us further on, but I'm a sucker for this.  It's a beautiful piece of work. I've heard it's going to be available for streaming.  I'll be first in line.

Writing Group

Welcome to my procrastination. Pull up a chair!  Would you like a cracker?

I have my writing group next week, and I'm up. I'm sadly lost for what to workshop, as I don't have anything I feel is ready. I'm working on a story, but it's not ready.  I've got some other things brewing, but nothing is feeling formed enough.

So, I went through my hard drive.  Who knew I had written so much? A couple of specs I started, a couple of shorts, different forms of the same thing seeing which form fits best. It's interesting to be confronted with an old image I'd left behind. Now the words put it back in my head, but I'm still not sure what to do with it.

And themes - who knew I had themes? And possibly even a style.  Not that I love it, but I think it's coming out. A voice.

Well, just wanted to check in. I guess I need to go work on that thing I didn't want to work on.  Now in a much better place knowing I have a whole bunch of starts I could take up if I needed.   That's a good feeling, right?  That's a start.

Loren Eisley

I was listening to RadioLab live from Seattle this morning. They were performing a program about the extinction of the dinosaurs, and a new theory that they were all killed by a meteor, and rather quickly. It was fascinating, but at the end of the segment, Robert Krulwich quoted the science writer Loren Eisley, with whom I am unfamiliar. I may want to familiarize myself. 

I have been very busy lately, as happens near the holidays, and all with good things.  Some things have been making me emotional, some are tiresome.  I've shot a short that I've wanted to shoot for a long time, and I've spent time with friends, seen movies, gone to Disneyland.  Even when things are good, though, I can get stressed out. I can forget the larger picture, which is more and more becoming an unknown I can relax into. For years, I had such anxiety about mortality, and larger questions.  More and more, I am finding that there is so much we can't know that I can revel somewhat in the overwhelm. It somehow becomes magical that we're here at all. It releases me to explore things that terrified me before, as they have been stripped of importance. I'm not arguing for some anti-social carelessness here, some nihilistic abandon, but rather the freedom that comes in accepting that everything has a place and a time, much beyond my knowledge, but appreciation of what is in front of me makes moments sweet, time expand, and breath easier and fuller. 

Below is this beautiful quote from a book by Loren Eisley, that hints at the wonder of it all. I loved hearing it:

We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians.  We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men.  Our identity is a dream.  We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight — the light of our particular day.  In a fortnight, as aeons are measured, we may lie silent in a bed of stone, or, as has happened in the past, be figured in another guise.  Two forces struggle perpetually in our bodies:  Yam, the old sea dragon of the original Biblical darkness, and, arrayed against him, some wisp of dancing light that would have us linger, witful, in our human form.  “Tarry thou, till I come again” — an old legend survives among us of the admonition given by Jesus to the Wandering Jew.  The words are applicable to all of us.  Deep-hidden in the human psyche there is a similar injunction, no longer having to do with the longevity of the body but, rather, a plea to wait upon some transcendent lesson preparing in the mind itself.

George Saunders

Here's a great video of George Saunders talking about writing. It's great.

Hanukkah

I've been lighting candles for the last few nights for Hannukah - the second night with a dear friend and her family on Thanksgiving, the last couple with my boyfriend, and tonight alone (though you're not supposed to do that, really, since it's about light and being together).  It's not something I grew up with, but I like the ritual.

I am also loving that R'Sharon Brous of IKAR here in LA and Amichai Lau-Lavie from Lab Shul in NY are writing prompts about Hanukkah to think of when lighting the candles.  Tonight's was about meditation, it was called Meditat8.  They all have clever names with 8 at the end for the 8 nights of Hannukah.  So far we've had Activ8, Appreci8/Agit8, Compassion8, Reanim8/Invigor8, and tonight's Meditat8, about World AIDS Day, the beginning of Advent, and taking a moment to reflect.

I don't know what my beliefs are, and I find buying into any dogma challenging, but I like knowing the reasons and thoughts behind the rituals. There is something comforting knowing that this celebration of a miracle has been done for thousands of years. I like that connection.  And I also like that even though it refers to a war, what is being celebrated is not the victory, as its not kosher to glorify war, but the miracle of having the light burn. Whether you believe it or not, it's beautiful symbolism.

Thanks-giving

I went to visit a woman I know in the hospital this morning. She had surgery for cancer, which she has been battling for six years.  This sounds like it was a difficult operation, as they had to separate her windpipe from her lung.  She's been cancer-free in those six years, but about a month ago a tumor showed up on her brain, which they got rid of with gamma rays, and now this one.  She was still a little out of it from the pain medication, and at one point said "we're worthy, we'll all be worthy" as she was drifting in and out. I have faith she'll make it, but this fight has been difficult it seems.

Another man I knew, a friend though not in my close circle, was murdered last week.  A lot of people I know are trying to make sense of it, but I don't know what sense there is to make. Senseless crimes by their nature don't make sense.  It's a horrible crime, and it's knocked all of us off-balance, some more than others.

I'm not inured to either of these incidents. There has been a lot of death lately, from the woman I know who died of cancer last month, to the husband of a work colleague who was shot at LAX last week. I cannot make any sense of it.  I've never been able to.

For better or worse, I've certainly been acquainted with loss, and premature loss.  Sometimes a surfeit of those losses makes you look around the corner in fear of what comes next. I've certainly spent nights just worrying that people I love would be killed, or I would be, or unexpectedly die.  I've learned that a constant cognizance of my mortality serves to freeze me rather than free me.

On the other hand, if I'm present, and let the emotions that happen come and go as they need, I come away with a kind of hard-won gratitude.  Instead of mourning eventual, inevitable loss, I begin to look around at what I'm thankful for. I have much to be thankful for.  I'm not sure what I'm thankful to, but I know I am thankful for.  When I'm in that place, I actually have a chance to forget that terrifying, unexplainable things happen all the time. I can start to see that wondrous, unexplainable things happen as well.

I was talking with a friend about hospital germs as we walked into the hospital. I was telling him about the microbiome about which we're discovering more and more. We have billions of organisms in us and around us that possibly effect everything from our thoughts, our weight, to our susceptibility to illness and moods.  We are each a universe, an undiscovered, uncharted universe, quite literally. We are just beginning to see what we're made of, and how much we don't know.

When I look around at grief, sadness, and senselessness everywhere, I know I can't expect to have it explained or hope to avoid it, anymore than I can hope to avoid my own mortality.  I can, though, walk around in my universe with a sense of wonder that we're here at all, and be thankful that I get to meet others along the way, with all our struggles, for a long or short time.  For that, I'm thankful.

Jackrabbit

I saw a giant jackrabbit last night.  In my dreams.

This is odd, as I've never dreamed of rabbits.  I may have written about this before, but I have vivid dreams that I often remember.  There are the recurring dreams I used to have, either trying to place a giant contact in my eye that would not fit, or speeding down a curving road unable to open my eyes.  Scary. I don't have those anymore, thankfully. The only thing close to recurring was a terrifying dream in which friends had left me their apartment but it was haunted by two evil sisters.  They came back in another house a few months later, but had calmed down quite a bit. They were dressed well this time, and though unwilling to leave, they seemed a little easier to live with.

There are the surreal dreams: people floating down green rivers in China to stand up in Best Buy clothing and say "welcome to home depot"; the flying dream where a deceased friend came with me and we bounced up in the air and tried to teach other people how to do it.

Then the mundane dreams, the ones I sometimes remember years later when I'm in them. They usually make no sense, and then years later I'm in the situation - this has happened to me only two or three times. It's always neat to remember having told someone of a non-sensical dream and have it happen years later. Hopefully I won't work at Home Depot.  For a while I used to think this would mean I was going to die, but since that hasn't happened yet, I figure it doesn't mean that anymore, at least. I had one dream where I was laughing with a young girl and very in love with her father.  That was a sweet one.  Who knows if these are dreams, fantasies, or possible futures - in any case they're interesting because they're mundane. I was even directing Melanie Griffith in one. That would be fun. 

Last night, though, I saw a jackrabbit.  He was the size of a deer, and was on my hood while I was driving.  He stared at me for a good long time, and I stared at him, but I was ultimately concerned mostly with shaking him off my hood.  After he got his fill of looking, he hopped away, enormous and unconcerned.  Good omen, or just a dream with a giant rabbit? Like any meaning maker, I can decide to ascribe meaning or not, I suppose.  He seemed an indifferent rabbit, but I wouldn't mind seeing him again.

Tom Cat

I just heard a version of this song. I've liked Laura Nyro for a long time - she's such a New York poet.  There's something about these chords that just evoke New York.  Perhaps I lean toward it from having lived there, but some songs feel like they belong there. This is one of those.  The chords feel like a cloudy, restless day in New York. I miss those days, the days when it rains and the water stays on the street and the clouds don't clear.

I love the rain in LA, how it storms and clears, revealing a crystal sky where even the clouds seem content and smiling - fresh with the breeze. Rain in New York doesn't always clear, and the night in the city reflects the water everywhere. Galoshes are needed. It evaporates at some point, but the sky can stay gray, blocking the sun from doing it's job. Rain in New York is moody. You can't help but feel it, too. I miss that sometimes.

Not enough to move back, but still...there are those songs....

Presbycusis

Fancy word, huh?

It means "age-related hearing loss."  I have it.  I listened to country music and musical theater so loudly in my walkman (remember those) in New York so loud that I gave myself tinnitus.  That fancy word means I have a constant ringing in my ears. This is really only a problem when I'm looking for silence, which is a good amount of time.

 I'm currently listening to a programmed Pandora channel based on Audra MacDonald, so it's heavy on musical theater and specifically musical theater women.  It's a little dramatic, but I can only hear the ringing during the pianissimo parts.  I've gotten pretty good at ignoring.

What I'm not as good at ignoring is difficulty breathing, which I am having at this moment. I like to ignore that I have bad allergies and mild asthma. I've had them both since I was a kid.  The asthma used to be worse, but it's reared it's head again here in LA.  I like to pretend I'm not asthmatic, but that's at my own risk.  This seems to be a coldish kind of thing that settled in my chest.  I'd prefer not to take another antibiotic, so I'm hoping to muscle my way through it.

I have some belief that I will find the right combination of sugar and wheat-free living with appropriate exercise that will magically cure me of being an allergic asthmatic with tinnitus.  An ear-ringing, wheezing man in his 40s.  I guess the possibility of that happening are slim.

I've never been great at acceptance. Tonight's a night I have to accept it.  But knowing me, I'll wake up tomorrow to dream again.

Success?

Sometimes, if I'm driving on Sunday morning, I catch a bit of the TED radio hour on NPR.  The program this Sunday, and the one the link is for, is about success.

It was an interesting hour - Tony Robbins talking about drive; a woman who won a MacArthur Genius grant for studying grit; Alain de Botton on how overrated the idea of success is - or what a trap it is.  Many voices.  During de Botton's talk, he mentioned how success in anything and family/relationships are opposed to each other - that people with healthy relationships cannot be fabulously successful, and vice versa. One of the two suffers.

Laying aside where this information comes from, or even if it is correct, my big question is why we ask these questions or come up with these theories.  Every day there is a new article about the habits of successful people, what they do and don't do, what they can have an can't have.  I read an article recently about how writers cannot be good parents.  Of course, the subjects were all straight men, and more than a few alcoholics, but the takeaway was that writers could not be good parents.  Once again, whether or not, from the random sampling of alcoholic mid-century men they drew from, is true - what's the point of asking the question?  At the end of it is the idea that there are limits to what can be done, that some things are not possible, that you cannot strive to have a balanced life, have healthy relationships, and be successful in an endeavor you choose.

To be fair, they were speaking of ridiculously "successful" people - titans of industry and scions of the arts. Still, though, what does an answer, even if it's flawed, lead us to?  Another metric to judge your own progress, and another way to evaluate you own choices?  Most of it does not lead to good valuation, and a good deal of it leads to a book purchase.  A book purchase like "Don't just do something, sit there", a manifesto for slow living.  We now need books to tell us how to slow down, to not take it so seriously, and wish we had the the idea to write a book about just chilling out so we could have become a rich, successful author. I'm sort of joking.

Maybe it's study fatigue, but truly being successful might be listening to yourself and where you're pointed, rather than someone saying what is and isn't possible.  There have been many artists with tortured family lives, and there have been many with brilliantly happy ones. There are awful people who are great successes, and wonderful people who are.  And there are wonderful unsuccessful people and awful ones, too.  No random survey can tell you what's possible, or what works for you.

In the end the program does make you look at what the idea of "success" is, and I'm glad they discussed it. Some restless spirits seem to never have enough, and what would look like "success" to a passerby looks to them like dismal failure. Others feel great just where they are.

There was a 75 year study on happiness and what makes people thrive released by Harvard this year. Sadly, all the subject were men, but it started in 1938, so a different time.  In the end, it seemed that "success" in life boiled down to "warm personal relationships."  It also mentioned how destructive alcoholism was, and the role parents play.  And even though I like this study, I still don't know what we'll know from the question.  We keep finding out what in our hearts we know already.  We even have aphorisms - 'money can't buy happiness', 'all you need is love', 'be here now'.

I guess, if nothing else, it keeps us busy, right?

Funeral

I went to a funeral today. The woman who passed died of a virulent form of cancer that she contracted in June.  I went with a work colleague who had also been introduced to my boss by her.  Because of her both of us have jobs. I wanted to pay my respects, she had always been kind to me.

Her best friend spoke during the short ceremony, and spoke of all the memorial services they had been to together for friends in the 1980s.  They had become a regular occurrence. I can only imagine his grief at saying goodbye to a friend he'd known for over three decades.  He played a song they played at those memorials, sung by a famous singer I've met. Her nephew coincidentally works in my group.

To make the world even smaller, a friend who sells plots at that cemetery remembered the woman who was being buried, remembered working with her on her mother's memorial stone as it had been unique. She was sad to hear of her passing, and enjoyed working with her.  I don't know why I take comfort in all these connections, but I do.

We drove to the top of the hill to inter the body into a wall.  The small pine coffin was set to go into a large marble wall, adjacent to her parents. In lieu of dirt, the man who had been her closest friend gave out white roses for people to place on the casket. He struggled with the thorns. A much older woman who had been her neighbor stood up to read a poem about ship, which meant a lot to her.  The man who was her best friend passed out sheets of paper with a poem he wanted to hand out and read as well. When they handed it out I read it. I can't have a piece of text in my hand and not read it. I couldn't follow, couldn't comprehend. It felt as inconsequential as the paper it was printed on.

Any grief brings to the forefront the losses one has already suffered. The pain is universal, the moment specific. The moment is universal, the pain specific. It bleeds into other memories until it encompasses what's around it.  Tears sharpen colors; you are aware of the ground you are standing on. What is mundane falls away in the face of a universal truth.

The man read the poem, which had also been a favorite in the 80s.  The poet had died young, full of unfulfilled promise. He was overcome for a moment. I could feel his pain reading this particular poem at the service for someone with whom he had survived, with whom he had a long shared history. Someone who was taken unexpectedly, and too young.  He was a survivor of cancer himself.   I've known people who have survived, and those who haven't. It is impossible.

A girl standing next to me dropped her water bottle and giggled from embarrassment with her mother, with whom she had been crying moments before.  Grief knocks up against laughter somehow; any relief is welcome.  The group placed roses on the pine box and it was elevated and lifted into the sepulcher.  We watched as two workmen pushed the body to where it would rest on the wall.

A man I know was asked to recite the mourner's kaddish, which he recited it in English. The prayer, said at most services for those remembering lost loved ones, is about the magnificence of God, the praise to him. A blessing and piece for all, for Israel. The words felt inconsequential.  I mouthed what I knew of the Aramaic original under my breath, wanting to hear that rhythm. Thankfully, someone asked for the man from the cemetery to speak it in the original language. Perhaps because I know it well, I get some sense of comfort from it, the intonations, the parts led and those spoken together.

Grief is too big.  Words are drops of rain on a roof. We can't not speak, but we can't wholly define the ineffable enormity of what we are feeling.  We keep trying.

Books and worms

When I was in Palm Springs this weekend, I impulsively bought Elizabeth Gilbert's new novel, which is being described as a ripping yarn about an independent woman of the 19th century. It's supposedly exhaustively researched, and breathlessly exciting. I'm hoping so.

Right now, I'm adding it to the pile, which just a cursory look at my bookshelf includes

IQ84
A Beautiful Mind
Patti Lupone's Memoir
God, A Biogra[y
Let the Great World Spin
A Great Unrecorded History: A new life of E.M. Forster
A Walk in the Woods
Why Does the World Exist

And that's just in front on the stacks. I can't help it. I'm a bookworm from way back. I have 3 books in my car at the moment. I've been reading Far From the Tree for about  months because it kind of breaks my heart every time I open it.  I read "Rapture Practice" in one day. I still haven't found my reading rhythm in LA after ten years, but I'm finding I'm much more likely to come home and crack open a book than I am to turn on the TV.   Luckily, I got rid of my DVR; it was a higher pressured bookshelf, as the programs would expire.  Now it's all streaming.  Without the pressure, I think I watch more.

I guess to take its place,  I re-upped my subscription to the New Yorker, since I missed it in print.  Luckily, those don't expire, but they do stack up like titles on a TiVo.

All this is to say, I don't have any business buying more books at the moment.  And yet, there are so many of interest. What can you do?

The other worms I've been thinking about are ear worms, those phrases of songs that get stuck in your ear for days, refusing to leave.  Kelly Clarkson's "Because of You" bops into my head fairly frequently.  The last couple of weeks it has been Miley Cyrus, god help me.

It must be how our brains work, recycling bits of catchiness that runs in the background like Muzak in a grocery store that we leave humming without even knowing we've heard.  I imagine all the books on my bookshelf started that way, with the thought equivalent that kept someone up, haunted them, hummed in the background until they finally wrote it down. It can happen with words, stories, memories, images.  Somethings lodge in our heads and just won't let go.

I like reading of others. It gives me some relief from my own.

The World, The Ocean, and smaller

I just got back from a trip to do a play in Palm Springs.  I didn't bring my computer, so for the most part I didn't look at facebook, or check the news. Occasionally I did so with my phone, but I tried to vacate. I'm not very good at it. It takes a few days to get in the groove of relaxing, and we really only had a couple days without rehearsal, and those had shows. It was nice spending time with people, and getting to know the cast more. My boyfriend was able to tag along, as I had my own room, so that was nice as well. I notice, though, once again, that I'm not a champion relaxer.

It was nice, though, to take a bit of a break from the world. I'm not quite ready to go back to work tomorrow.  I logged onto facebook and saw some great things, but also this upsetting article about the horrible state of our oceans. Do not read unless you like feeling sad and powerless.

I can only control my own little world. And really, I can't even control that. I can only be in it. I jumped on here today just to give my fingers some exercise and to run my brain a little. I'm not sure I even have a point, except that I can only be where I am.

I don't think I really missed facebook. It was nice to sit and actually chat with people. We had a couple of mornings around the pool, and some time around tables and meals. I feel fortunate that I have the chance to do things like this with great people.

The state of the ocean can make me despondent, but there is no point in despair. If anything, I'm learning that despair, depression, despondency, fatalism, complaint, anger have little solution embedded in them unless they spur you on to action.

I'm very sad about the ocean, but I can't wring my hands. I can possibly do some research and see what I can do, if anything.

Like I said, I don't really have a point. The world can be overwhelming. I know it's important to take the chance to step out of the usual every once in a while or my engine will be completely flooded, but it's also important to do things so that when I do step out, its worthwhile.

Or maybe it's time to notice that I'm looking at a four day trip with two days of rehearsal and three performances as a vacation.

Um. I think I'm tired.  Good night.

Anger

I feel myself getting angry at the slightest little thing lately. I'm not really sure why, though I have my theories. They include: sugar, sleep, over-information and the inability to find an exit off the information super highway, powerlessness in the face of all that's happening around us on a day to day basis.

I'm sure any could be a culprit. I've had enough experience to know that anger unexpressed turns inward. I've had much experience in that.  Anger turned outward feels ineffectual, though. I've always been frustrated by calm politicians, but I see that there is no solution in anger. It feels good, we need to get it out, but there is no common ground. There is nothing but scorched earth.  Even when I express anger, I feel ridiculous about halfway through, and always feel the need to apologize.  Lately I think it's just a surplus of information and nowhere to store it.  Overwhelm and powerlessness.  They're looking for a way out. Anger is the easiest way.  There's no target; I'm not the kind of person who attacks anyone or anything.  During a bout of this a few years ago I went to a batting cage and batted balls for an hour.  That felt great. Exercise works, too.  With the current yahoos in Congress stopping all discussion and blaming things on everyone but themselves, it's hard to even turn on the radio.

Meanwhile, I hear meditation helps.

I was amazed today at this young woman, Malala Yousafzai. I saw this clip of her on the Daily Show, explaining what she would think about being attacked, which she was, and the understanding she would show - that her first thought was anger, and then she reminded herself that anger would not help, only make her the same as her attacker.  No wonder she may end up being the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. I know my problems do not compare to this, though they feel real nonetheless.  I can only hope for some of her compassion and understanding, while also being grateful that I am not in  a country where this threat is a daily reality.

The Santa Ana's

I remember reading Janet Fitch's book "White Oleander" years ago. One of the motifs is the evocation of the Santa Ana winds, the hot, dusty winds that come through Southern California this time of year. I lived in New York then, which has no equivalent I can think of, except sudden inclement weather every month of the year, barring possibly a two week window at the end of April and beginning of May.

The Santa Ana's I know about now. They don't possess me to do crazy things like the characters in the book, rather they bring dust and pollen. It's more mundane, but it certainly has an effect. Once again, I am sneezing all day, even with allergy medication, and unsure if I will wake up tomorrow with a full-blown cold or feeling better. My check engine light went on yesterday, too, resulting in another bill for several hundred dollars on my car, the second time in as many months. I'm blaming it on the Santa Ana's.

On the bright side, I got to eat the slightly junky food I like when I have a cold - macaroni and cheese with peas and grocery store rotisserie chicken - while watching junk food TV.   I also get to drive a rental car for two days, courtesy of my mechanic, which is pristine white and much cleaner than my car.  I'm trying to find maybe something else with the wind -  the hope and remembrance that things will blow over as quickly as they blew in. SoCal problems.

Ah- choo.

West Hollywood Book Fair

I went to the fair on Sunday. The West Hollywood Book Fair. I always enjoy it, as it's smaller than the UCLA/USC book fair, and I also know a lot more people involved.

I swung by my friend Charles' booth for Bloom, his award-winning literary journal. I ran into the effervescent Paul McCullough, who was facilitating Q & A's for the food stage and also signing his new book on Roma tomatoes called Roma Therapy.  Eduardo Santiago was signing his new book Midnight Rumba as well. I also saw someone I know who was playing keyboard for a friend of his doing a piece on the poetry stage and I helped him move the keyboard from his car.  So I like this one, as I end up knowing people from around.  Even though I don't live in Weho, it feels neighborhood-y.

The people I didn't know (though turns out a couple are connected to other people I know, since the world is very small) were the ones whose panel I went to on memoir and secrets.  The panelists were Daniel Stern, the author of Swingland, his account of the Swinging subculture; Kimberly Rae Miller, the author of Coming Clean, her memoir of growing up with a hoarder as a father; and Aaron Hertzler, whose memoir Rapture Practice is about growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian household.  The talk was informative, and I'm interested in reading all three.  Miller's seems a little more serious in tone, though Hertzler's book definitely deals with some weighty issues, though targeted to a young adult audience. Stern's is an interesting comic escapade/how-to manual, which is a fascinating hybrid.  All three deal with writing something that is usually hidden or kept secret to varying degrees.  There was talk of shame, or difficulty, in writing these things, and also how the others involved have reacted.  It's an interesting topic with confessional or personal writing.  I think of that Joan Didion quote that a writer  is always selling someone out.  I don't know that I'd agree with that, but it takes bravery to put one's own experience on a page, knowing that others involved will see themselves portrayed, possibly unflatteringly. Each of the authors had a story about that, as well as their own trepidation of putting something personal out there. Interesting factoid - they are all actors.  Miller has a BFA in acting, and Hertlzer and Stern both have MFAs.  The moderator, Dinah Lenney, is an actress, memoirist, and writing teacher as well.  I bring it up as she did. Interesting coincidence.

I have an MFA, too - is a memoir in my future?

It was a nice afternoon. I'll go again.  I would have loved to buy more books, but that's always the case. I need to get better at reading them all, too. One at a time, I guess. That's the way.

Patty Griffin

This is great news about Patty Griffin's Silver Bell.

I found these couple of paragraphs really interesting -

"I love revisiting that time about myself now," Griffin says on vacation in Northern California. "I think it's good to have the songs rescued from that time. I think if you were involved and around those big, corporate takeovers where a beverage company decided it would be a good time to buy a record label, and you weren't doing what everybody knew to be popular at that very moment, you weren't given any respect whatsoever.

Case in point: Griffin recalls a meeting circa "Silver Bell"'s intended release with then-label group boss Jimmy Iovine where, "he basically told me, 'You have never made a good record,'" she says. "He handed me a copy of 'Beautiful Day,' which is a U2 record, and said, 'Take a listen to this. This is how you write a hit record.'"

She did end up writing a great song called "Heavenly Day" years later, though probably not based on that song. She has said it's probably the only truly happy song she's written, and that she wrote it for her dog.  Love that. 

I'm interested in that idea that because she hadn't had a big radio hit that she'd never made a great album. Her songs have been covered by many people, and she's incredibly well-respected.  But what makes success?  There are so many songs and artists that no one will ever remember who made lots of money off of a song, or even an album.  But making songs that are emotionally resonant, touching, lasting, even hint at something truthful, is much more difficult, probably not as commercial. Certainly, for me, more important. 

It's great when art and commerce merge.  It doesn't always happen. I'm happy we get a chance to hear the whole thing redone, though now I'll cherish my bootleg copy.