Charles Burchfield & John Fowles

The Coming of Spring - Charles Burchfield

Evolution has turned man into a sharply isolating creature, seeing the world the way we like to think of our private selves. Almost all our art before the Impressionists - or their Saint John the Baptist, William Turner - betrays our love of clearly defined boundaries, unique identities, of the the individual thing released from the confusion of background. This power of detaching an object from its surroundings and making us concentrate on it is an implicit criterion in all our judgments on the more realistic side of visual art; and very similar, if not identical, to what we require of optical instruments like microscopes and telescopes - which is to magnify, to focus sharper, to distinguish better, to single from the ruck. A great deal of science is devoted to this same end: to providing specific labels, explaining specific mechanisms and ecologies, in short for sorting and tidying what seems in the mass indistinguishable one from the other. Even the simplest knowledge of the names and habits of flowers removes us a step from total reality towards anthropocentrism; that is, it acts mentally as an equivalent of the camera view-finder. Already it destroys or curtails certain possiblities of seeing, apprehending and experiencing. And that is the bitter fruit of the tree of Uppsalan knowledge.

Two Ravines - Charles Burchfield

It also begs very considerable questions as to the realities of the boundaries we impose on what we see. In a wood the actual visual 'frontier' of any one tree is usually impossible to distinguish, at least in summer. We feel, or think we feel, nearest to a tree's 'essence' (or that of its species) when it chances to stand like us, in isolation; but evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or a hermit. Their society in turn creates or supports other societies of plants, insects, birds, mammals, micro-organisms; all of which we may choose to isolate and section off, but which remain no less the ideal entity, or whole experience, of the wood - and indeed are still seen by most of primitive mankind.

Gateway to September - Charles Burchfield

Scientists restrict the word symbiotic to those relationships between species that bring some detectable mutual benefit; but the true wood, the true place of any kind, is the sum of all its phenomena. They are all in some sense symbiotic, being together in a togetherness of beings. It is only because such a vast sum of interactions and coincidences in time and place is beyond science's calculation (a scientist might say, beyond useful function, even if calculable) that we so habitually ignore it, and treat the flight of the bird and the branch it flies from, the leaf in the wind and its shadow on the ground, as separate events, or riddles - what bird? which branch? what leaf? which shadow? These question-boundaries (where do I file that?) are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision. Long before the glass lens and the movie-camera were invented, they existed in our eyes and our minds, both in our mode of perception and in our mode of analysing the percieved: endless short sequence and jump-cut, endless need to edit and range this raw material. - John Fowles, The Tree

Conventions for Abstract Thought


(Is this video working for you? Can you see more than one image?) Here's the link if you can't.

Charles Burchfield via JW.

Need to Summon My Inner James Franco

When I read this, I realize something very essential about myself.

I am just not working hard enough. Or may just not smart enough. The time has come. I'm down to the wire on this thesis, not to mention a certain other deadline, and now I must reach way down deep and let loose my inner James Franco.



James Franco.



Movie star. Soap star. Simultaneous attender of 4 grad schools. Writer of short stories, a novel, and various newspaper and magazine articles. Maker of student and indie films. Rising media and possibly conceptual art star.

James Franco.

Franco.

Among other things: Bender of time and space.

Be the Franco. Be the Franco.

Boy Meets Girl Structure Slightly Twisted #5

Suttree

Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corriders where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.

Old stone walls unplumbed by weathers, lodged in their striae fossil bones, limestone scarobs rucked in the floor of this once inland sea. Thin dark trees through yon iron palings where the dead keep their own small metropolis. Curious marble architecture, stele and obelisk and cross and little rainworn stones where names grow dim with years. Earth packed with samples of the casketmaker's trade, the dusty bones and rotted silk, the deathwear stained with carrion. Out there under the blue lamplight the trolleytracks run on to darkness, curved like cockheels in the pinchbeck dusk. The steel leaks back the day's heat, you can feel it through the floors of your shoes. Past these corrugated warehouse walls down little sandy streets where blownout autos sulk on pedestals of cinderblock. Through warrens of sumac and pokeweed and withered honeysuckle giving onto the scored clay banks of the railway. Gray vines coiled leftward in this northern hemisphere, what winds them shapes the dogwhelk's shell. Weeds sprouted from cinder and brick. A steamshovel reared in solitary abandonment against the night sky. Cross here. By frograils and fishplates where engines cough like lions in the dark of the yard. To a darker town, past lamps stoned blind, past smoking oblique shacks and china dogs and painted tires where dirty flowers grow. Down pavings rent with ruin, the slow cataclysm of neglect, the wires that belly pole to pole across the constellations hung with kitestring, with bolos composed of hobbled bottles or the toys of the smaller children. Encampment of the damned. Precincts perhaps where dripping lepers prowl unbelled. Above the heat and the improbable skyline of the city a brass moon has risen and the clouds run before it like watered ink. The buildings stamped against the night are like a rampart to a farther world forsaken, old purposes forgot. Countrymen come for miles with the earth clinging to their shoes and sit all day like mutes in the marketplace. This city constructed on no known paradigm, a mongrel architecture reading back through the works of man in brief delineation of the aberrant disordered and mad. A carnival of shapes upreared on the river plain that has dried up the sap of the earth for miles about.


Factory walls of old dark brick, tracks of a spur line grown with weeds, a course of foul blue drainage where dark filaments of nameless dross sway in the current. Tin panes among the glass in the rusted window frames.There is a moonshaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.


Here at the creek mouth the fields run on to the river, the mud deltaed and baring out of its rich harbored bones and dread waste, a wrack of cratewood and condoms and fruitrinds. Old tins and jars and ruined household artifacts that rear from the fecal mire of the flats like landmarks in the trackless vales of dementia praecox. A world beyond all fantasy, malevolent and tactile and dissociate, the blown lightbulbs like shorn polyps semitranslucent and skullcolored bobbing blindly down and spectral eyes of oil and now and again the beached and stinking forms of foetal humans bloated like young birds mooneyed and bluish or stale gray. Beyond in the dark the river flows in a sluggard ooze toward southern seas, running down out of the rainflattened corn and petty crops and riverloam gardens of upcountry landkeepers, grating along like bonedust, afreight with the past, dreams dispersed in the water someway, nothing ever lost. Houseboats ride at their hawsers. The neap mud along the shore lies ribbed and slick like the cavernous flitch of some beast hugely foundered and beyond the country rolls away to the south and the mountains. Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark's total restitution could appease.


We are come to this world within the world. In these alien reaches, these maugre sinks and interstitial wastes that the righteous see from carriage and car another life dreams. Illshapen or black or deranged, fugitive of all order, strangers in everyland.


The night is quiet. Like a camp before battle. The city beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea? The murengers have walled the pale, the gates are shut, but lo the thing's inside and can you guess his shape? Where he's kept or what's the counter of his face? Is he a weaver, a bloody shuttle shot through a timewarp, a carder of souls from the world's nap? Or a hunter with hounds or do bone horses draw his deadcart through the streets and does he call his trade to each? Dear friend he is not to be dwelt upon for it is by just suchwise that he's invited in.


The rest is indeed silence. It has begun to rain. Light summer rain, you can see it falling slant in the town lights. The river lies in a grail of quietude. Here from the bridge the world below seems a gift of simplicity. Curious, no more. Down there in grots of fallen light a cat transpires from stone to stone across the cobbles liquid black and sewn in rapid antipodes over the raindark street to vanish cat and countercat in the rifted works beyond. Faint summer lightning far downriver. A curtain is rising on the western world. A fine rain of soot, dead beetles, anonymous small bones. The audience sits webbed in dust. Within the gutted sockets of the interlocutor's skull a spider sleeps and the jointed ruins of the hanged fool dangle from the flies, bone pendulum in motley. Fourfooted shapes go to and fro over the boards. Ruder forms survive. - Cormac McCarthy

2 x Derrick Jensen

I don't know. I think I've already posted that last one. Or maybe I've watched it so many times that it feels like I've already included it in the source material.

Crooked Still Tonight

Just about to drive up to the city to see Crooked Still with some pals at the Great American Music Hall. Here's a clip of them rehearsing The Absentee in their studio and few others to whet the appetite.



One of my favorite songs.

Boy Meets Girl Structure Slightly Twisted #5

And just because I like it - Gatz. I saw this three years ago at the TBA festival.



Bonus: one of my favorite comedy routines of all time.

Late Night Music Obsession

Suburbs by Arcade Fire. Both of these videos are made by fans. Not rotary fans. Arcade Fire enthusiasts.



via d. Sharp.



Mountain Goats - Going to Georgia

Just Sayin'

It really bugs me when directors refer to the actors they're working with as "my actors." Albee does it a lot. Even if it's not what's intended, the language conveys a sense of ownership and a general misconception about the nature of the relationship. It's like you can't own a cat. Really. They tolerate you and in some cases show you great affection. But it's a mistake to think for a minute they're yours.

On the Prospect of Writing A "Character Description" Edit #3

Edward Albee describes how he creates and develops his characters.



Interview with Albee at Emory University. It takes awhile for this interview to get going. There's some obvious nervousness on the part of the interviewer combined with the fact that Albee never lets her finish a sentence. They get into a rhythm after awhile though, Albee opens up and goes off his usual script. NB: I don't agree with Albee at all about Robert Wilson.

Bolaño re: Writing

With every day that passes, I am more convinced that the act of writing is a conscious act of humility. - Roberto Bolaño

via The Rumpus. Love this website/blog. Stephen Elliott is the Cherpumple pie cake of my day - honest, complex, sweet, suprising, generous goodness.

September 5 is officially Cherpumple Pie Cake day. I'm making it. My friend Tal down in Texas is making it. The day will be documented and I'm inviting people over. Please join us! I'll be posting about it here. So if you decide to do it, you can include a link to your creation in the comments section. Or you can just come check it out.

Another juicy link here re: Derrida's supposed textualism. via A Piece of Monologue. How's that for being all over the place?

And finally. Rick Moody interviewed at Big Think. (via The Rumpus). It's interesting to listen to him talk about the homogeneity of stories via commercial publishing and graduate workshopping, etc and to realize the similarities between theater and playwrighting. And also: the impact of time on the writing process - kind of what I was getting at in the Character Description Edit #2 post.

On the Prospect of Writing A "Character Description" Edit #2

I'm midway through the first draft of a play. And I'm finishing my thesis. Which is why this has become a video blog of late (one of the reasons anyway). I'm caught up in these two storms and that's where the words are going, where the energy is being applied.

I don't know what everyone else does - I can guess what Albee does - when confronted with the prospect of writing a character description. I'm sure Albee does it first thing. And it would be easy for him because his process is all about knowing the characters before he starts writing. But for me, a character description, if I write one, is pretty much the last thing I write. I didn't used to write stage directions either - just dialog. But I've branched out a bit - forced to branch out in grad school screen-writing classes. My scripts got notes like - can you give me at least one scrap of description here? And so I made myself do it and it was pulling-teeth painful. Dreadfully painful. I guess I don't think I do it very well. Which is why I'm not a novelist. But anyway, I've overcome it and even though I still don't think I do it very well, I do realize I've gotten better and reading screenplays is why. Screenwriters can be very clever; they can convey amazing images in just a scrap of description. And then there's Tennessee Williams with the poetic images and O'Neill with the lengthy descriptions down to the color and curl of the hair - very literary that. And for both of those writers, what they do seems right. For them.

But when I do it, it seems suspect. The convention itself. I doubt it for some reason. I've been trying to sort out why. I guess it has something to do with the fact that I self-produced for a long time and have seen so many auditions that I realize I'm not going to the get the right actor by giving them a list of personality traits to portray. That for me, finding the right actor has as much to do with how much I like working with them and how strong my reasons and my instincts are (and whether the feeling is reciprocal - also very important), as it does with the fact that they can run through a set of behaviors (I'm more interested in the actor's behavior to be honest). I've also written roles for and with actors in mind and that has its downside too. Mostly because, then, it isn't necessarily always about the story.

I'm sure a character description is helpful to actors (maybe?). Yeah. It helps me as an actor. At least in an audition. As a kind of shorthand. A way of capturing the essence of something. But beyond that - not sure. I know I don't spend much time thinking about how the character is described. I read the script (of which, technically, the character description is a part). So I read the script except for the character description. I read all the blocking notes. I read all the lines. And I figure out my character in action. I find them physically. More and more as I read and move around in rehearsal and at home.

Okay. So. I'm not acting. I'm not directing. I'm not producing. I'm writing a play. That's it.

This has been very difficult for me. It's something I've been dealing with for the past 7 years. Just doing the one thing. Because one of the things I realized about self-producing is this: doing everything can get in the way of the one thing and can start to have an effect on the one thing. And did have an effect on it. Grad school was kind of great in that way. It gave me the freedom to only do the one thing - tell the story. Focus on the story. And forget about everything else. Not my problem, the everything else. Tell the story.

And it works so well. The leaps I made are huge. And continue to be. I've written things that I wouldn't have if the pressure had been on, the work had room to breathe and I had time to observe and assess all the impulses that were coming my way and decide which ones were right. There was no panic. This spaciousness is necessary for me.

And suddenly I'm back in it - the pressure. The machine. And as grateful as I am about being given the opportunity to write and get produced, it's also jarring. Right now, it seems like so little attention or care is being paid to the story or the process of how the story comes about. I get a directive to provide a character description and this is necessary, of course. But what gets lost is the process. What gets lost is the story. So. Right. Writing a character description means a complete shifting of gears for me. It's a different process. And even more so because I doubt the actual convention. And am trying to figure out what it is and make it mean something for me. And to the story. It's so alien to what is actually happening in the script. To what the script actually is. And now this is part of the process. And accommodation should be. The flexibility to go with things that are flying at you. And it's been productive, in its way, this prospect of writing the character description. This setting aside time to think about who these people are - distilling them into a few sentences.

But - round and round -

So much really depends on the actors...but you can't get the actors if you don't advertise the auditions and how will the actors know if they're interested if they can't read about the characters? So yeah. But. But. But. When it comes down to it, the character description is going to be a poor way to judge whether you want to be in this play or not. Because it in no way prepares you for the ride you're going to take. And that's where it becomes important who the actors are. Who they are as people. As artists. And maybe this has nothing to do with the story either.

not finished...

On the Prospect of Writing A "Character Description" Edit #1

Ack!

I thought I mistakenly deleted this whole blog. As my 3 year old says, "dat not duud."

Tree Sounds

Amazingly, this sounds tree sculpture sounds like one of my favorite elevators (a very short list).

(via Susannah)







And this. A cottonwood tree.
(Via Jake.)

More tree.


Wind Harp in South San Francisco. Might need to make a field trip. If only to feel and hear the planes fly over.

A Wish, A Prayer, A Malignancy

Going through an old notebook, I was reminded of a secret wish. I would love to have a copy of the text or any record of the performance of Memory Palace, the la fura dels baus performance for which William Gibson contributed text. I haven't applied my research skilz to doing as much as I can to find it, but now that I think of it, I'm only a tweet away from the actual text source. Really. It's too simple.

Anyway, I also found some extensive quotes from Bert O. States' The Pleasure of the Play - which I must have been pretty enamored of considering just how much of it I wrote into my notebook. But this particular quote seems relevant to what I'm experiencing as I attempt to complete the first draft or rather contemplate completing the first draft of the tree play.

Action is like music, there is no way to stop and have it. If you stop it and think of the play as a spatial construction with its parts in hypothetical repose, you discover that each part is made of littler parts that are made of still littler parts, right down to the syllables that compose the words.

As in Zeno's paradox of the flying arrow, there is no end of "places" the play has been, or will go, and since it is always equal to itself...you end back at the absurdity that you are treating something you know to be in motion as if it were at rest.

yeah. that's about right.

Oh and this well, this is one place where the play lives. Which is, of course, my current obsessive music selection.

5 Things: Random Sampling

• I'll Go On: An Afternoon of Samuel Beckett. A Philoctetes Center discussion featuring Lois Oppenheimer, Edward Albee, Alvin Epstein, Tom Bishop, and John Turturro.
  
• The Creativity Crisis: Research shows that American Creativity is Declining. This article discusses how standardized school curricula, national testing, and rote learning erode creativity - which exactly what I've been witnessing in my oldest son since he started kindergarten (he'll be going into 5th grade this year). This past year, he was done with school around February which means that we had to keep motivating him (or at least trying to keep him out of trouble) for the last three and a half months of school. Since the first month or so of school is about review (which also tends to demotivate him), what happens is that he's engaged for about 3 months out of the school year (and there's peaks and valleys even in that). This year is about seeing how we can change things for him. Anyway, it's great to read an article from a mainstream news source that confirms our experience.
• New word (for me):
  
  criticaster 1. An incompetent or inferior critic. 2. A contemptible or vicious critic.
  3. A petty or inferior critic. As in: The rancorous and reptile crew of poeticules, who decompose into criticasters. - Swinburne

• Katya Mezhibovskaya’s Packaging Thesis
  

• This speaks for itself. I must to make it. Via my buddy @talgribbins.

Two Performances

A throw down by Sinéad O'Connor. I like how completely aware she is of the technical aspect of the performance - the mic levels, tempo of the orchestra - and at the same time immersed in realizing the emotional requirements of the song. Great use of gesture to affect vocal color. She's vulnerable and strong at the same time. Hot. Very hot.



And here is Thom Yorke singing After the Goldrush. This performance goes everywhere from failure to frustration to humor and success. Very generous and vulnerable to go though it all in front of an audience. Plus, one of my favorite songs.