such a long time gone

Didn't seem that long ago, end of September, stateside, Main St. in Beacon, with KR giving Raul the Jewel a clippering to some Hugh Masekela (kid's choice, as it always is when he's under the buzz)...

cleaning out the camera today, I found the evidence. Body language. Necessary procedures. Fathers and sons. 2009.

Catnip

I was just trying to get a little work done this afternoon, when, out my window, along came a dirigible.



I'm easily distracted these days.

I am what is around me / Women understand this

It's Wallace Stevens' theory, but the other night at Podium, when C was holding court...

making our sides hurt from laughing....

it fit him just perfectly.

Muka

The german djs don't call it musik anymore, they call it muka.  And it's not really muka it's muke - the e makes an uh sound -  slang jw told me he heard for the first time from C, who's now out of the krankenhaus and back in Kassel for the weekend to start work on the new piece. MF is along for the ride too, as well as B, who will layer live percussion over the electronic score the two dj/producers will compose.  Still following?

I sat around listening to the four of them talk music for a couple of hours the other night.  The working title for jw's new piece is 'catcher' and it will deal with violence.   I chopped red peppers for the vegan bulgar dish getting whipped up in the kitchen and scanned the walls for new images in the ever-growing collage.  But mostly I just listened to them brainstorm about sounds they want to find and record (trains entering the station; wind; the sound of something being torn), to sounds they'd made before (sandstones rubbing against each other, amplified, slowly giving way to classical music), to music that inspired them.  And tell funny stories about falling out of bed.  

Here, they start off trying to figure out the name of a Kaempfert song C sampled in the last piece.  At the end you hear C say, "It makes me totally excited! I mean it, really." and M says, "Yeah yeah.. eat your food."  

Comet

Madeline has lived in Berlin for over a year now, but I still haven't gotten over the shock and pleasure of seeing her - suddenly, on a day's notice -  standing in front of me.   

I moved to Germany 3 years ago, and at first the awareness of being a continent away from my family was pretty much constant.  In the US, I'd always felt that tiny invisible threads connected me to everyone I loved, no matter where we all lived.  All I had to do was tug one of the threads, and that person would respond.  Or the other way around.  On the day my grandmother died, I was working my desk job at J.  I was the receptionist; my job was to answer the phones.  I answered and it was my father, calling to tell me about the accident.  

Sometimes I can't find the threads at all anymore.  They're still there, but they're buried under calculations of time-zones, work schedules, empty phone cards and warbling Skype connections.  I have to actually hear my cell phone when it rings, which most of the time it doesn't because I'm in a theater; I have to get the message from my home machine, which most of the time I don't because I don't understand the German directions on how to re-set the damned thing; I have to read the email, which arrives when I'm sleeping and by the time I wake up what if it's too late.   I worry about the threads.  I imagine my father trying to track down the number at the theater, and wonder how he would communicate with the German receptionist, and how she would find me in the maze of the theater, and what if I was on my lunch break?

As I came out into the lobby after the premiere Saturday, I saw Madeline right away and walked straight over to her.  She was talking to Fred in the beautiful wedding tie and Jens, back from Berlin, and Roland, spiffy in his sweater, who came straight from a job in Frankfurt.  I stood behind her for a moment - she hadn't seen me yet - just long enough to hear her say,  "It smells like Li.." and as she said my name she turned around, and there I was.  

We had 20 hours.  We had drinks.  We woke up and talked about the dances, about the art gallery, about the elephants Roland is building for the circus, about Fred's eternal search for chairs for his classroom...  

We had coffees.  We had brunch and Roland made a comet on the restaurant table and we took photos 

and we kissed each other a lot.  I couldn't get over it.  She was right there in front of me.  

Bear-Girl-King + reinhardswald

Here they are, peeps...the first photos of the 2 pieces that premiere tomorrow. Send your toi-toi-tois, your break a legs and your merdes our way.  It's all going down at 19:30 kassel time.

The evening opens with Bear-Girl-King, by our Israeli guest choreographers, where everyone is masked by black full body unitards, united by movement rituals and disembodied sounds.   

A girl emerges from the group...  

as does a bear... 

and eventually, a king.

The evening continues with reinhardswald, the title of which comes from the famous woods near Kassel which inspired the Brothers Grimm for many of their fairy tales.   It's an anti-hero's tale, the story of the wolf.

But is he really a wolf, or just a child trying to get what he wants? 

How far do his fantasies take him? 

And what exactly happened to him when he went into the woods, all alone?  

Reclamation projects

This week, in addition to moving ahead with some new writing, submitting finished poems to magazines, and putting my notebook project to bed, I decided to gather all the poems that I have cut from my manuscript over the last couple years. I figured I would pull this little batch of near-poems together, take another look at them, see if there were poems (or parts) that I could improve/salvage/finally euthanize. Good thing to do with the time over Christmas. My thinking was that maybe after coming close a couple times this year, there might be something already lying around that, with some tinkering, could help put my manuscript over the top in 2010.



I didn't realize there were going to be an additional 80 pages of work... it's like the book behind the book.

Yesterday I pulled out the red pen and dug in, not trying to fix things yet, more seeing whether, with a bit of distance from them, I could more easily identify the problems/shortcomings of the poems.



Sometimes the problem is getting into (or out of) the poems. Beginnings and endings.



Sometimes a poem doesn't know what it wants to be, or how it wants to be.



Sometimes I don't know what to do, or even what's there... I just know something's wonky.



Some poems have hokey conceits, or deep-seated problems that aren't really fixable. At times you have to cut your losses. The only option left is to sell it for scrap. Hopefully the scraps will help another poem that hasn't been realized yet.

Though I'm only about a third of the way through the stack, I'm happy to note that there have also been a few poems which I think are finished, and solid. They may not make their way back into what I'm assembling as a manuscript now, but they might be the start of the next thing...