27 August 2005: Postcards of the Hanging

I've had a busy Summer.

Six-week Summer semester, mid-June through late July; two excellent classes, Art History and Critical Thinking, each of which crammed a regular semester's worth of work into that six-week period. Critical Thinking was the really challenging one, the reason I didn't have time to do any journalling here, or anything else anywhere else. I produced around sixty pages of fairly writing for that class. Mr. Planas, the teacher, was the same teacher I had last semester for the Creative Writing class in which I produced the poems "New York City Eyes," "Lesson," and "Family," and in which I first met Oz (now an important friend and a dedicated aikido student). Mr. Planas is an extraordinary teacher, the only one I've had so far whose teaching (both last Summer and this one) has actually led to substantial improvements in the quality of my writing.

Three of the papers that I produced for this Critical Thinking class turned out well enough that they're worth publishing on this site; I'll be doing that as soon as I find the time to reformat them.

In late May, at the time of the Requiem for a Friend performances, I was in the best physical condition of my life so far; six weeks of sitting at desks all day caused my body to deteriorate horribly. I'm not making any focused effort to get back in shape now, but it's happening anyway, just by virtue of the fact that I'm back to my regular routine of aikido and yoga.

Even though it's only been a single season since last I worked in the paratheatrical medium, it feels like at least a year. Over the summer, I integrated the effects of the last round of paratheatrical work into my life, my consciousness, and my aikido. The intensive exercise of my intellect this Summer was also transformative: It was a deep pleasure to give my intellect that much exercise, and it reminded me that a sharp intellect is a gift not to be taken for granted; that, like the body, it craves exercise, stretching, play, and conscious use.

The next paratheatrical lab begins in three weeks, and it promises to be... um... interesting. The working title of the project is Two-Faced Clowns.

Yes, clowns.

The combination of the paratheatrical medium with the art of clowning strikes me much like the combination of advanced free-form martial arts practice with LSD: as soon as I encountered the idea, I knew it was an infernal, idiotic mixture that I'd advise anyone to steer well clear of - and I also knew, with horrible, moment-when-the-brakes-lock certainty, that I wasn't going to steer clear of it at all, that I was going to throw myself into it at the earliest opportunity. Curse me for being exactly that sort of Fool.

Those who want to see more of exactly what sort of Fool I am are in luck, because this lab will culminate in five public performances in mid-December. Youl'll find the performance dates and lab details at www.paratheatrical.com/clownlab.html.

And speaking of the paratheatrical work, you regular readers may recall that footage of the Requiem for a Friend performances was going to be incorporated into Sherpa's new film, the working title of which was The Greater Circulation. That working title has now been discarded; the film is now entitled Rilke's Requiem. The public Bay Area premiere is scheduled for November 1st (location to be announced). I'll probably get to see a preliminary version of it sometime before then; when I do, I'll post my review of it in this journal. In the meantime, you can find all sorts of details about the film, and a QuickTime clip of one of the dream sequences, at www.verticalpool.com/requiem.html.

At the end of the first week of August, to celebrate our three-year anniversary and my survival of the Summer semester, Dragon Lady and I took a road trip down to Santa Cruz, where we stayed at a bed-and-breakfast, were warmly welcomed at the excellent North Bay Aikido dojo, walked on the beach, and watched gigantic seals play and fight under the piers.

Rhiannon is in town visiting; she came over to my place on Thursday so I could help her with the details of the fight scenes in her third novel, because, as she put it, she doesn't want them to read "like they were written by a girl." If the parts of it that I got to read in the process are any indication, it's going to be a great book. And if you haven't yet read her first novel, The Fool's Tale, get to it.

Friday (that is, yesterday) Rebis came over and gave me a Reiki treatment - the first one I've even had, despite the number of Reiki practitioners and enthusiasts I've met over the years. I had intense visions. Then we had lunch and talked a lot - she's become a good friend in the past year or so, and it may be a long time before I see her again: next week, she's moving to Thailand to enter a Buddhist monastery. It was an entertaining little bit of synchronicity to be hanging out with her the day after hanging out with Rhiannon, since one of my favorite stories about Rhiannon is how she got herself thrown out of a Buddhist monastery, when she was about the age that Rebis is now.

An email that Ace sent to me a month ago, describing a dream he'd had about me:

I dreamed last night that you went on a continent-spanning pan-Asian voyage of esoteric discovery lasting two years or so, and then came back and sent everyone you knew cell-phone text messages that said they sucked, and you didn't want to associate with them anymore.  Except at the moment that everyone got them, including me, you were staying with me, in my living room, and no one else had seen you since you got back, so we were trying to figure out what was going on -  whether you had sent them in some sort of altered state of consciousness, or someone else had sent them or what.

 

Speaking of Ace, if you haven't visited his journal, The Book of the King, on his House of Cards site lately, he's posted a lot recently, after a long hiatus - check it out; he writes in a way that lends even the most mundane subjects a touch of magic.

In the second of my two entries of June 20th, I mentioned that, inspired my my father's hobby of burning compilation CDs of songs around particular themes, and particularly by his autobiographically-themed compilation 100 Years of Solitude, I had created my own autobiographically-themed compilation, In the Blue and Silent. I spent most of the second week of August creating three more themed compilation CDs that had been incubating in my head all Summer, entitled, respectively, Postcards of the Hanging, Perfect Strangers, and One of Us. They're not autobiographical the way 100 Years of Solitude is for my father or In the Blue and Silent is for me, though of course they're reflective of my personality, in that only I would choose to express those particular themes with those particular songs in that particular order under those particular titles. And One of Us is sort of a "collective autobiography," in that it's basically about weird adolescents, and all those of my kind could probably recognize aspects of their younger selves in it, if not their current selves.

Much of the fun of making compilation CDs is trading copies of them for copies of other people's compilation CDs. I'm currently playing by these CD-trading rules: I'll trade a copy of In the Blue and Silent for a copy of your own autobiographically-themed CD; I'll trade a copy of Postcards of the Hanging, Perfect Strangers, or One of Us for a copy of any compilation CD you've put together around any theme, even if the theme is as broad as "songs that you like," or as abstract and indescribable as the themes of Thomas Pynchon's V., or of my father's compilation CD The Logistic Difference Equation.

Sometime prior to his suicide this past February, Hunter S. Thompson took up this same hobby of putting together compilation CDs. When the paramedics were carrying his body out of his house, Thompson's son Juan placed a copy of Thompson's most recent compilation in his lifeless hands, ensuring that Thompson would have good music to listen to on the next leg of his journey.

Thompson had entitled this final compilation Where Were You When the Fun Stopped?