i've seen that face before

I saw him again.  Just over a week here and there he was, like me, on a laptop, Saturday night, amongst the cinema-goers and dates.  We still haven't spoken.  I wrote this back in April.

with poet’s face

and dancer’s feet

 

he’s everywhere I go

like my conscience

with a fresher laptop

 

once

I greeted him with smile

like he knew

that what I saw when I looked

was part phillharmonic

part bamuthi

with a little monk-type goatee

 

sockless in black jazz oxfords

his feet spoke to me of

the build-up of rosin on callouses

his face

like he was about to step to the mic

has become my local familiar

 

we’ve never spoken

his tongue could reveal

brixton or chicago

montego bay or mali

 

but everywhere I go

there he be

smallish frame

glasses

macbook

reminding me

of people who bring their messages

dressed in humanity’s best

he tests my artist

demands gangsta get a coat check

 

he’s wire

sinews

intellect

bundled

like new versions

of old software

into my synapses

til I wonder

is he real or imagined

 

he haunts all my spots

looks up when I walk by

always wonderin why

 

maybe there’s some two people

I remind him

somebody loved

or somebody left behind

somebody taught him some steps

or somebody sang lyrics to his beat

 

now I don’t know next

pretend we’re old friends

or walk on by again

keep the mystery deep

or find out he’s an out-of-work

software designer?

 

maybe just the reminder is this:

see the best of what we know

in every face we meet

see movement in even planted feet

imagine the lives behind the eyes

and pick your spots carefully.

 

 

say goodbye to hollywood

Poetry was gone within the week.

 

Maybe it was the bleak terrain.

 

The concrete sunshine.

 

The stench of nothingness.

 

This was no Sartrian exercise in stomach disorders.  This was where inspiration came to die.

 

After trudging itself up winding ribbons of asphalt, it came here, to this place, expecting to sit pretty atop the hill.  Instead, the hills tended to crumble underfoot, or slide down themselves like kindergartners at a water park and pretty was for sale at the corner store.

 

Not for the feint-hearted.  Though inspiration never thought of itself that way.  It had tended to thrive even in the darkest corners.  It had a way of finding the crack in the crevice where moss might grow.  It had made its living off resilience.  Its bread and butter was how it sought shine even when buried beneath layers and layers of bland, or banal, contrived or cowardly.  Its prowess lay in its navigational dynamics – it seemed always to be on a collision course with hallelujah whether at storefront Baptist Church or the Mount of Olives or Leonard Cohen’s exhale.  It knew where it stood.

 

Until today.  Until here.  Until what had happened.

 

It didn’t seem like much.

 

A simple whimper.  A laying down of trowel.  A momentary giving up on the task to wipe brow, sip cool lemonade in 120-degree sun that turned into siesta that transmogrified into hiatus that ended it all.

 

No one will tell what it is.  No one can say.  It can’t be put into words, not in any way that has meaning.  In fact, it is the end of meaning.  There is no context for this; there is no context left.

 

What buried here today itself so ephemeral so ephemeral

yet so eternal

that we cannot say

we simply cannot say.

 

It sure happened quick, though.

Best be vigilant, ever get a chance again.

 

There was once an expression for that,

but no longer.

 

 

 

 

10,000 hours

It keeps coming up.  It went from concept to meme.  10,000 hours haunted me all of a sudden – showing up in a friend’s poem, in conversation, in print – everywhere.

I haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, but it was on my list.  Someone mentioned the 10,000 hours concept – that you achieve mastery over something after having dedicated 10,000 hours to it, and after that, it was everywhere.

I immediately began to think of my 10,000 hours list:

writing

dance

music

theatre

cinema

film production

event production

sleeping!

The list would go on.  It scared me, the list, to be honest.  I felt I should have achieved more status after all this hard work, training, practise and rise to mastery.

 Maybe there’s a loophole.  Maybe I should read the book.

 

 

stealing broke

Who do you have to be to try to steal from me?

It’s a funny concept, really, if you know me.  The amount of money I’ve usually got in my bank account is hopefully enough for me to foresee food and transportation for the next, oh, week or so.

I’ve been a vegetarian, for a long time.  A vegequarian for a shorter time.  Imagine my surprise when logging on to check my bank balance and finding I had spent money at McDonald’s.

I’m a pedestrian, having left Los Angeles specifically not to have to have a car.

Imagine my surprise when logging on to check my bank balance and finding I had spent money at Exxon.

Yup.  Someone somewhere, well, in Chicago, IL, had gotten hold of my debit/credit card number and was using it at the most unimaginative of places:

McDonalds

Walmart

Exxon

 

If you’re going to steal – be creative.  Buy yourself a Hello Kitty mountain bike and take it Utah for a spin.  Book a flight to Seattle just for a really great coffee and a walk around Green Lake.  Get box seats to the Metropolitan Opera.

Mind you – you might need to steal from someone with a bigger balance for all that.

 

 

the brave experience

I so hate writing anything negative, especially not secretly hidden in one of my notebooks, but instead in public -- especially about artists or people trying to present them or their work.  yesterday’s blog didn’t sit well with me, but I did feel it warranted saying.

 

Tonight I was privileged to go to a screening of Samantha Morton’s stunning film The Unloved at London Film School.  Additionally, the directress was present for a Q&A after the film.  (Why  not directress??)

 

The Unloved is the diametric opposite of The Girlfriend Experience.  It’s a piece of cinema created to fill a need – a need in an artist and I daresay a need in her community.  A need in my community.

 

I volunteered with foster youth for about 6 years in Los Angeles.  Long enough to know that this safety net presents so little safety it’s daily frightening.  Long enough to know we need to do much better.

 

When coaching youth poetry, I became close to a small group of teens – mostly girls.  That birthed a spoken word piece, but despite the number of times I related my experiences with and feelings about the foster care system to people to hear that that was a movie I should make – I could never do it.  It never felt right.  It never felt real.  It felt like there’d be no way to write a movie about these lives without inviting exploitation into the process.

 

It just wasn’t my story to tell.

 

It is, however, Samantha Morton’s story to tell.  Not only because she’s an actress of depth and quality, not only because she’s a director of fortitude, but because it is a partially autobiographical story.  She lived to tell it.

 

This film needs to be seen.  You don’t need a review; just a recommendation.  Made originally for Film 4 and screened first on television, it plays like the best kind of art film – one that puts people in the centre without sacrificing any of the craft elements of film.  Sense of place, or rather sense of displacement, is used brilliantly here, and the sound design is some of the best I’ve heard in an indie since, oh….Laws of Gravity.  In the Q&A, when Morton cites Wim Wenders’ American Friend, there is a loud clicking sound in my brain – the use of colour and landscape harp back to that masterpiece.

 

Morton was insistent on shooting film, insistent on not appearing in the film, insistent on her moral and aesthetic commitment to the material.  She spoke on the need to use real, working, trained actors – especially in the roles of these at risk youth – because they would be prepared for the real emotions the story brings up, would know how to deal with them, process them, and hopefully leave them at work at the end of the day.  A film set is a place for professionals; otherwise it’s all just psychodrama.

 

Magic can happen when you don’t condescend to your subject.  A master like Soderbergh should never have missed that point.  Morton, a novice directress, approaches humbly, with caution, yet certainty, and in my mind achieves magic:  she simply translates the untranslateable.

 

The two LFS students in the lift at Covent Garden station didn’t agree.  They seemed to feel about it much the same way as I felt about TGE:  why didn’t she show and tell more, reveal more, why wasn’t it deeper.

 

Is this just the beginning of the gender split in this century-old medium?

 

When men can’t place themselves even for 90 minutes in the shoes of a female protagonist and women finally begin to address storytelling from our own perspectives?

 

Will it be necessary to just give ourselves a different title – say “directress” – to differentiate our ways of seeing and processing?

 

The other night, I had a dream.  A dream that I was accepting the Best Directing Oscar – the first one presented to a woman.  It was presented to me by Barbra Streisand.

 

In lieu of an acceptance speech, I just held the heavy (yes – it is really heavy) statuette aloft and said the names of those who had come before:

 

“Barbara Streisand, Sofia Coppola, Ida Lupino, Lina Wertmüller, Allison Anders, Jane Campion, Martha Coolidge, Amy Heckerling, Adrienne Shelley, Diane Keaton, Kathryn Bigelow, Elaine May, Darnell Martin,  Gillian Armstrong, Nancy Savoca, Penny Marshall, Nancy Meyers, Deepa Mehta,  Andrea Arnold, Maya Deren, Julie Dash, Angelica Huston, Maya Angelou, Julie Taymor, Joan Chen, Joan Micklin-Silver, Claire Denis, Agnieszka Holland, Catherine Breillat, Agnès Varda, Antonia Bird, Susan Seidelman, Euzhan Palcy, Chantal Akerman, Niki Caro, Jodie Foster, Maggie Greenwald, Lynn Ramsay, Nicole Holofcener, Miranda July, Sarah Polley, Mira Nair, Beeban Kidran, Allison Maclean, Maria Maggenti, Kasi Lemmons, Mimi Leder  Randa Haines, Dorris Dorrie, Shirley Clarke, Joyce Chopra…the list could go on.

 

We are here.  And we are going to tell our own stories now.”

 

Add Samantha Morton to that list.

 

And Sasha Gray.  Maybe when she’s done with all the glamour, she’ll stop letting men write the story they think is her and open her pretty lips to speak for herself.

 

I’m so grateful The Unloved was made.  Other than White Oleander, I’ve never read or seen anything that so accurately portrayed this system.  I’ve recently learned that someone close to me was placed into foster care while very young.  It’s hard for me to process his experience, except in light of my own experiences growing up and working with youth, yet seeing this film somehow made it clear.  The only safe place is a tiny light inside you that you try beyond trying to give harbour to.  Not everyone makes it without that light blowing out. 

 

But it’s the artist’s job to keep relighting that flame.