hendricks experience

CHECK IN FOR A DAY, STAY FOR A LIFETIME.

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 22:24:35 -0500

I was riding up the elevator at the Jane Hotel in New York and remarked to the elevator bellhop guy that I was looking forward to the hallways breaking into flames. He looked concerned and expressed his wish that such an event wouldn’t happen. I realized that he hadn’t seen the movie and that it might be a good idea to come back (to the hotel) and screen the Coen Brother’s Barton Fink and brief the staff more thoroughly on the cinematic antecedents of their current abode. The hallways and rooms all exude that Barton Fink feeling. I laughed when I saw the inscription on the hotel’s business cards, “Check in for a day, stay for a lifetime.” The same inscription as appears on the stationary in Barton’s room. Everyone is dressed in the red caps and uniforms, and I swear I saw someone disappear down a trap door behind the vintage reception desk. My lecture would be based on Joseph Campbell’s ideas on the mythological journey, and a paradigm I’ve applied to hundreds of films. So, this is for The Jane, and happy to discuss further at your new Café Gitane, next time I come to stay. (Shoes lining the hallways might be a nice touch.)

Barton Fink starts in the Ordinary World where the character and the situation are defined. Problems and conflicts are already waiting to be activated. What is at stake that commands our attention? We first meet Barton Fink backstage at the premiere of his play. He acts superior and cynical of his own success. We hear the electric winch as the curtain descends and we move to a tony New York restaurant where sycophants toast the “triumph of the common man.”

The next stage is the Call to Adventure. The hero must set out on a quest to save the tribe. The call may be conscious or unconscious but is significant and demands a response. A pager summons Fink to the bar where his agent tells him of an offer to write scripts in Hollywood. He is reluctant but his agent reminds him: The common man will still be here when you get back.

This leads to a Refusal of the Call, which is predicated by our fear of change. It’s difficult to exchange the known for the unknown. There is a danger involved that forces the hero to overcome their fear and violate the limits of their knowledge. The first stage of transcendence that may lead to cosmic wisdom. In Fink’s case he arrives at the Earle Hotel in Hollywood. He externally accepts the call but his internal struggles will soon rise to the surface. In the classic myth a Mentor usually appears at this point of departure to guide the hero in their search. This muse may be in the form of a person or it can be an inner voice. Ludnick, the Capitol Pictures executive, initiates Fink into the world of writing wrestling pictures and thanks him “for his heart.” Other mentors, mostly of the ‘fallen’ variety, in the form of Charlie Meadows and W.P. Mayhew, are soon to arrive.

Stage Five is the Crossing of the First Threshold. What Campbell refers to as, “The entrance to the zone of magnified Power.” The die has been cast. There is no turning back as the hero enters the terra incognito. This descent into the depths of the psyche is played out as Fink sits in his hotel room and wrestles with ‘the life of the mind.’ Meadows tells him three times he is the common man and has stories to tell. Fink doesn’t listen. He is indoctrinated into the madness of Hollywood, and his own psyche as represented by the people he meets.

This period of initiation is described by Campbell as “the perilous journey into the darkness by descending either intentionally or unintentionally, into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth, the hero soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolical figures.” The endless corridors, peeling wallpaper, oppressive heat, shoes in the hallway, strange noises and visitations make up the “dream landscape of curiously ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials”, that Campbell describes. This is the sixth stage and the midpoint of the death and rebirth transformation Fink has embarked upon. Will he survive or has he already sold his soul?

The Approach to the Inmost Cave is the next step. This is a stage of preparation wherein the hero gets ready to confront the demons and the darkness. Fink will turn to the Goddess in the form of Audrey, Mayhew’s secretary. She agrees to help him write the simple morality play the studio is paying him for. It’s with her he loses his innocence as he finds out she has written Mayhew’s books. She seduces him, and he discovers her murdered body next to him in his hotel bed the following morning.

Stage Eight, The Supreme Ordeal. The death of the ego. The hero confronts their greatest fears and is literally or metaphorically reborn. Fink has crossed the border and can never return to his former self. At this point we know Fink’s journey is unlikely to result in redemption. There is a negative and positive side to every archetype, and Fink now turns to his neighbour, Charlie Meadows, aka serial killer, Mad Man Munt, to help him destroy the evidence. The next stage is Reward-Seizing the Sword, wherein the hero experiences a wider consciousness, a sharpened perception of the essence of things. In the positive journey it is distinguished by a gift that symbolizes a realization of divinity, an elixir that provides knowledge, enlightenment, insight, and self-realization. In Fink’s case, he receives a packaged box from Charlie who tells him it contains his life possessions.

Stage Ten, The Road Back. The need to escape from the lower depths of the psyche, which is purely a symbolic world, and re-establish themselves in the known world with their newfound wisdom. Often the hero has to relinquish the vestiges of their former self before the journey is successfully completed. Fink suddenly begins to write and the mysterious box that sits on his hotel desk appears to be the source of inspiration. He also has to deal with the detectives who are investigating Audrey’s disappearance and who reveal Charlie’s true identity.

The road back inevitably leads to the eleventh stage, Resurrection. The final confrontation with the dark forces that threaten the stability of the newly formed self: the shadow. If the hero loses the battle, traditional to the tragic plot, then the resurrection happens through the catharsis experienced by the audience who recognize themselves in the hero’s failure.

“I’ll show you the life of the mind”, Charlie hollers as he marches down the Earle Hotel’s hallway that has erupted into flames. He has emerged from Fink’s psyche to show him the true mind of the common man and the hell contained within. Whether it is the fascism in Hollywood, or Europe, as people get ready for war. Fink’s illusions are now shattered and his pact with the devil is finally realized.

The journey is completed with The Return with the Elixir. The immediate circle of death and rebirth is closed and a new journey will begin. At the end, Fink has sold his soul, Capitol Pictures owns the contents of his head, and will pay for his silence. He is left on the beach with the box containing the muse’s head. A lost soul condemned to exile in the palace of dreams. Fink bound himself to his own ego and the world destroyed him.

So if you’re in New York, check out the Jane. An original hotel inspired by an original film. And in my experience, I checked in for a lifetime but only stayed a day. Or two. Might have been three.

Collages, models, graphic novels, board games, (including Scienopoly) wood carvings, knitting and...

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 03:28:00 -0500

Collages, models, graphic novels, board games, (including Scienopoly) wood carvings, knitting and sewing, fashion designs, journals and haikus. Letters, playing cards, graffiti, installations, dioramas, stuffed animals, sculptures, drawings, furniture, sketches and papier-mâché. Polaroids, photo albums, posters, puppet shows, pastels, paintings, protests, pottery, poetry, plays, postcards and photographs. Diaries, storyboards, screenplays, short stories, novellas and live performances. Remixes, songs, essays, confessionals, comics, websites, videos, video games and slideshows. Blogs, Facebook experiments, bouquets of white feathers, porcelain oranges, and so much more. The first assignments have arrived from the Film on the Future course and I see nothing but nostalgic and progressive pollination creating fresh gardens on fertile soil. A phalanx of green shrubs and flowering trees reaching towards the digital horizon of the virtual desert. The world is changing and is being changed. What has happened is happening again. Everyone misses Elmer’s glue. And comic books. And Etch a Sketch. There is a definite bloom on the desert rose. Everybody is an artist. Art exists in everyone. (With the usual suspects habitually absent, leaving their absence a mystery.)

Screened Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Danny Boyle’s Sunshine and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker last week. This week I’m showing Luis Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, and Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain. My final film festival is eco videos at Lucky Bar. Then a blizzard of marking, a feverish round of faculty and related parties, many Hobo tasks to attend to, endless meetings with students, coffee with TA’s and significant others, a rapid current of emails, and then there’s all the stuff that’s really going on. I am feeling very grateful for my circumstances. I remain confident that everything that is happening is actually happening, and that all of the creative juice, and all the chance and meaningful encounters, will enlighten me as to what it all means. Why is it so great that people are gluing things together and making videos and writing about the childhood disease that drove them to the edge of despair? What do we learn about love and desire from Bunuel, or from the brilliant cinematography of Vittorio Storaro in The Conformist, or the dream sequence in Stalker? Why teach Sunshine and The Fountain when there are so many films to choose from? These are a few of the questions that I will never, or really want to, know the answers to. I am in constant and restless search of more mysteries, having given up on solutions long before I remember.

Most mornings I have a coffee and walk down to the duck pond with Sophie, my Tibetan Lion dog. The sky is steel gray. The trees are naked and vulnerable. The wind is sharp. The yellow grass is defeated. The squirrels are stoned. The blue herons are hypnotized. The deer are lost. The crows are scheming. The ducks are as amusing as always. I’ve been immersed in the same four Dylan songs for the last four walks. “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “Born in Time”, “Cross the Green Mountain”, and “I’m Not There (1956)”. My Sophie stroll mediation and a voyage that takes me through an emotional range I would compare to reading Dostoevsky’s four great novels. Or Notes from Underground, Tropic of Cancer, Dharma Bums, Hunger, Mysteries, Catcher in the Rye, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Hamlet, The Red Book, Endymion, Letters to a Young Poet, Last Exit To Brooklyn, Under The Volcano, Journey to the End of Night, Steppenwolf, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Leaves of Grass; to name a narrow margin. All works distinguished by their brazen honesty and raw exposure. Their one continuous feeling and vibration sustained from start to finish. “I’m Not There (1956)” is an entire sorrowful world unto itself, and is presently the most articulate and truthful depiction of angst and lost love I’ve ever heard. (I’ve sometimes wondered if the 1956 affix is an inference to Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl”, which was published that year.) I’m aware that I can’t stay in this realm forever and try to surrender to being completely immersed in the walking dream now. All in all, a pleasant excursion and an opportunity to mark trees and sniff grass before driving through the drowning rain forest to an office overflowing with artistic adventures. How do you grade a porcelain orange, or puppet show, or graffiti, or spaceships made from papier-mache? An interesting question and one I will answer, one mystery at a time.

“Did you listen to the words?” Bob Dylan

“I didn’t need to man.” John Lennon

I was swept up in Barack Obama’s election and all the hope and optimism that was in the air and that...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:39:00 -0500

I was swept up in Barack Obama’s election and all the hope and optimism that was in the air and that was articulated with the proclamation of “Yes we can.” Around this time I was approached by a student and filmmaker, Jamie Tanner, who had made a beautiful and disturbing video about the effect of fish farms on our indigenous salmon stocks, and who asked me to write some words to reinforce his images and interviews. Jamie’s film and my original text can be found at: Yes We Can – A Salmon’s Testimony. This is for our friends, the salmon.

We are silent by nature. We believe, if we believe at all, that our actions speak louder than words. Our story transcends all recorded history. For millions of years we have followed the same path. We have been programmed to survive. We have been designed to adapt. If we could speak, if our movements were translated into syllables, our mantra would be similar to your own. Yes we can. Yes we can continue our journey from the fresh water pools and streams to the salty oceans and seas. Yes we can continue to provide nourishment for the bears and the forests, sustenance for humans and all living species. Yes we can overcome the dams, the pesticides, the logging, the floods and fires, the commercial and sports fishing, the global warming and the pollution, the majestic eagles and the hungry killer whales. Yes we can continue to chart the treacherous incline back to our birthplace where we willingly give our lives so our eggs can be given a slim chance to perpetuate our legacy. And yes, we will fight to the end but always go calmly, for in death no new fate befalls us.

We have never, not once, deviated from our mythology. No salmon has ever willingly left the path that nature has so clearly defined. We have been celebrated for our perseverance and self-sacrifice. For our consistency and our courage. We have been elevated to symbols of wisdom and rejuvenation. Hinduism and the Vedas, Celts and Druids, Jews and Syrians, Christians and Buddhists, Orpheus and the Fisher King, Haida and indigenous people from all the worlds’ tribes, past and present, have relied on us to feed them with our bodies and our purpose. Yes we can is the message that we helped inspire by our steadfast mission to keep our place in the chain of life. Yes we can is our silent murmur as we punish our battered bodies through currents and rocks enroute to our holy land, our mecca, our shallow graves where new life will begin again. We are survivors. We are adapters. We are determined. We have faced every challenge of every millennium. Only of late has there been whispers of doubt and hesitation. Only recently has there been a question of Can we?, casting an ominous shadow over our symbolic actions.

Even our worst enemies love us in their own way. Like the honeybee and the tiger, we will be missed, and we will be mourned, when we are gone. Many of our fellow travelers will likely be soon to follow, and before long all mythologies will retreat back into the silent void from which they sprang. One last parched skeleton placed facing upstream as a gesture for hope and rebirth. Yes we can was the sincere objective behind the efforts of those who worried about our demise and built farms in order to ensure our survival. But from these farms came an adversary unlike any we had faced before. A sea lice that is capable of a destructive force that stymies our journey’s blueprint. We are hopeful that our protectors and our predators, those who have come to rely on us, and those who have come to love and respect us, are starting a dialogue, are building the science, performing the research, creating a consensus, taking the actions that will come to our defense. We have never asked for anything. We are silent by nature. Our story transcends all recorded history. We will persist in our life’s journey and we will embody, Yes we can, until we can’t. We are the wild salmon.

EVERYBODY SEEMS TO BE BUSY SHOWING WHAT POLISHED PERFORMERS THEY ARE AND THAT MEANS NOTHING THESE DAYS - IT'S HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE DOING THAT MATTERS. — JIMI HENDRIX

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:48:00 -0500

I’m listening with interest at a back table in a busy coffee shop in Chinatown. My former student is talking passionately about a new screenplay idea that came from a dream he had about the end of the world. This is the tail end of Reading Break and I’ve been averaging two coffee shops a day. Talking about marking free-range film essays with my TA at Moka House. The intricacies of the long poem and editing a literary magazine at Union Station. Letter of reference exchange at Paradiso and generating ideas for eco videos at The Grindstone. Two screenplay and eco related meetings at The Habit and The Spiral. Discussing the past at Mirage Café, contemplating the future at Buon Amici’s, and here now at Bean Around the World in Chinatown, talking about the world’s end. Feels to me that things are just getting started and I think of Godard’s proclamation that “everything is still to happen.” Everybody I’m meeting up with is doing something and going somewhere and there is a vibration of unlimited possibility in the damp cold air. Still, winter has arrived, and despite the constant stimuli and caffeine, a seasonal shadow of darkness is moving in. The world (of Autumn) is ending/ended.

Everybody has soul. I really don’t like that word in connection with the Experience. I like the words “feeling” and “vibration”.

I went up to campus to play myself in a video a student is producing for my Film on the Future class. I had told the class of 150 that anyone who could build a spaceship that could fly would get an A+. My final scene in his video is watching as the Fine Arts building fires its rockets and explodes into space. I rage off and punch a tree, muttering that I’ve never had to give an A+ before. Tonight I attended a fundraiser for the local cycling scene and watched a film about Gwendal Castellan who rode his bike from Patagonia to Inuvik in the Yukon. A solid adventure and reminded me of Werner Herzog’s statement that his film school would consist of walking from LA to Tierra Del Fuego. Went to see This Is It, and was reintroduced to Michael Jackson’s immensity as a performer. You could put his best ten minutes against anybody in history. Also caught Leonard Cohen’s Live in London and so thankful to share my Canadian identity with another one of Hobo’s patron saints. Went to Fiamo, (a friend’s Tuscan restaurant) for the first year anniversary party and enjoyed a generous sampling of Italian food and Argentine Malbec. Later stopped down the street to catch a set from Kuba at Darcy’s. I’ve been listening to The Fleet Foxes and they seem to resonate everything else I listen to and like. Jules turned me on to the ‘felicien’ music video for “Roll on Arte”, by our new friends, The Felice Brothers. Patti Smith’s version of Dylan’s, “Changing of the Guard”, and Jimi’s, “Are You Experienced”, are beyond anyone’s reproach. No shortage of inspiring stuff coming in and going out. Still, amidst all this listing of encounters and events and experiences, I’m feeling a bit listless and expectant. Like there’s something riding in with the next storm…

I had very strange feelings that I was here for something and I was going to get a chance to be heard. I got the guitar together ‘cause that was all I had.

Drove seven minutes up the road to Thuja Plicata, the grove of medieval red cedars where the salmon make their valiant run in Goldstream Park. Walked through the cedars and black cottonwoods to watch the mostly Chum salmon fight their way to their deaths in the creek’s rapids. Glaucous winged gulls, a pileated woodpecker and some American Toppers circumventing the struggle and the carnage. No eagles around which seemed unusual. Took the boardwalk down through the sword fern and salmonberries to the nature house where the count showed Chum at 7800, Coho at 178 and Chinook at 23. Better than some years, worse than others. Nice to be momentarily isolated from the influx of human industry and back in nature’s pocket where primal battles are being waged. Good to see that the run is respectable and people still bring their children out to witness their epic journey. I wander back up the trail and bask in the protection of the five hundred year old cedars and dimming winter light. The skeletons and struggling bodies of the salmon are a conscious marker of perseverance and sacrifice and a quick meditative reentry into the world of the real. From coffee shops to classrooms to celluloid and coho, chum, and chinook, most everyone is still alive and working their way upstream.

I BELIEVE THAT IF WE SURRENDER OURSELVES TO THAT VOLUNTARY DREAM WHICH IS ARTISTIC CREATION, WE SHALL BE ARGENTINE AND WE SHALL ALSO BE GOOD OR TOLERABLE WRITERS. — JORGE LUIS BORGES

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

All the leaves were gone and the sky was grey. Faces were illuminated by the bluish glow emanating from the televisions in the suburban windows. Rows of discarded and dying pumpkins lined the road as I drove through the island’s rain forest on the way to my office at the university. Manu Chao’s anthem song, “Clandestino”, sparked my soul and my thoughts wandered to Buenos Aires and the magical words of Borges who continues to teach me how to read and write, awake and dream. “What can I hold you with? I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of jagged suburbs.” These are the words and images that stir my imagination when the first of the winter rains begin to fall and the only sun to be found is resting in my ever-expanding library. I’ve been collecting books like firewood throughout the long hot summer and their pages will keep me warm and dry as the wet winds of the Pineapple Express change everything I think and do.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

This last week I lectured on Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky, La Notte by Michelangelo Antonioni, Contempt by Jean-Luc Godard, The Matrix by The Wachowski’s and Children of Men by Alfonso Cuarón. All films that have left an indelible impression, and in some cases, their mark. I had a student film festival at Lucky Bar on Wednesday, wherein their collaborations with local indie bands summoned fifteen new music videos entering the public realm. I was also invited to lecture on the subject of creativity for a large Fine Arts class and in the spirit of the subject, decided to talk spontaneously, without a lot of conscious preparation, and tried to weave my way through the two hour exercise without mentioning the word, creativity, itself. How do you commodify or objectify something that is the very essence of who we are and everything we do? Art, thoughts, dreams, directions, excuses, breakfast, my words, what the students choose to hear; everything that has ever been done and seen, are all acts of creation and creativity. Can we ever truly define love, or beauty or inspiration, et al? Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and departed knowing that some will have agreed with my observations, and some will have left feeling cheated by my deliberations. I wouldn’t want or expect any other result. Talking about creativity is not dissimilar to talking about talking and disagreements are both inevitable and necessary.

What happened is not to be put into words, since words, after all, stand for a shared experience.

I’m writing this now on the other side of Georgia Strait at the Hobo office in Vancouver. The November rains beat an urgent pattern against the floor to ceiling windows that overlook the city skyline and sheltering mountains. Misty and dreamy and as beautiful as the legends have told. The core Hobo team gathered at The Cellar on Granville St. last night to appreciate and support the music of our good friend and Hobo collaborator, Kuba Oms. A packed house including some friends and contributors: Michael Belgue, Val Litwin, Jeff Petry, K-OS, and many others. Kuba laid the soul and rhythm down and created a brilliant hour of inspiring music and performance for both him and us. We continued on to sample Korean BBQ at Jang Mo Jibs on Robson St. where we talked about the fact that all we have accomplished has created a firestorm of things that now need to be addressed. Always arriving at designated end points to discover a new starting line, an endless corridor of revolving doors and open windows. The ongoing realization that creative plans and designs are never finished but only abandoned. The persistent rains plummeted from the night sky as we reentered the urban streets on our way back to headquarters. Issue #11 is arriving in the world as I write this now and I continue to dream of us all walking the historic boulevards of Buenos Aires with #12 under our arm, and Borges in our court.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

Like so many adventurers and travelers before me, I want to write a love letter to New York. Or...

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:09:23 -0400

Like so many adventurers and travelers before me, I want to write a love letter to New York. Or write a poem, compose a song, make a film or music video, a short story, an essay, or I suppose a blog entry. I wonder if the words, poem, story, film, or video, sounded as awkward when they were first introduced as the word blog sounds now? I imagine a future where blog will be uttered with the same intention and respect as poem and song. In any case, I have recently returned from the Hobo Magazine mission to the enchanted city and I have fallen in love: in love with the people, the history, the mystery and the opportunity.

Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dreams, Lover of loneliness, and wandering, Of upcast eye and tender pondering! Thee must I praise above all other glories That smile on us to tell delightful stories. For what has made the sage or poet write But the fair paradise of Nature’s light? I Stood Tip-Toe Upon a Little Hill — John Keats

I meet up with Shawn and Jules at the new Standard Hotel and finally cast my gaze on Issue #11. And we hit the pavement running. Coucous and mint tea at the Café Mogador, dancing at Lit, breakfasts at Balthazar and The Standard Grill, Americanos at Café Gitane, steak at Bacaro, radishes at Prune. Friends, photographers, models, writers and artists at The Ace, The Standard, The Jane, and The Maritime. Supporters at McNally’s bookstore, and shops like Opening Ceremony and 45 rpm where clothes take on a whole new meaning.

Let them say that I walked in fair nature’s light, And that I was loyal to truth and to right. Cross the Green Mountain — Bob Dylan

Emailing from The Jane, visits to art galleries, scorched by the sun, drowning in the rain. Meeting some of our contributing photographers like Owen Black and Hugh Lippe, connecting with our favourite hotelier, Alex Calderwood, at the new Ace, where rock stars should hope to be treated so well. Lunch with former Forbes writer and blogger Devon, the daughter of one of my oldest and dearest friends at the Good Stuff Diner, and a message from Ms MM, my favourite eco-warrior as she prepares for a climate conference in Japan, add magic to the mix. My new friend Tommy at Tello’s Ristorante at 8th Ave. and 20th Street where I stop to get out of the rain on my way back to the hotel. I’m reading my Keats with a bar candle supplied by the lovely bartender Mary, when he inexplicably buys me oysters and clams and keeps my wine glass full as he regales me with stories of the Russian Bathhouse on 10th Street, between First Avenue and Avenue A, providing ideas to the director of an Al Pacino indie, his life running six other establishments in the Chelsea area. We make plans for me to come back and spend a day in the life. Beautiful.

My props for this visit are DVD’s of Jun Ichikawas’ Toni Takitani, and Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story. Transcendent and timeless cinematic poems that would be the inspiration for my film version of the odyssey. My only book is John Keats — The Complete Poems, which was motivated by seeing Jane Campion’s Bright Star. An elegant film and I am reminded that Keats died at 25. (What the hell!?) The music playing in my ears is a hybrid of “Oh No” by Andrew Byrd and “Cross the Green Mountain” by Bob Dylan to “Two Weeks” by Grizzly Bear, and the ever so ethereal “Gila” by Beach House. A soundscape as soothing and informative as the architecture and poetry that surrounds me. A ladybug lands on my hand as I bask in the sun on the steps of The Jane Hotel. I admire her comfort on my skin and accept her presence as the bearer of good luck she is known to represent. I love New York.

The imagination of a boy is healthy, and mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness, all the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste… Appeared with Endymion when it was published in May 1818 — John Keats

IN THE LONELY NIGHT, IN THE STARDUST OF A PALE BLUE LIGHT, I THINK OF YOU IN BLACK AND WHITE, WHEN WE WERE MADE OF DREAMS. I WALK ALONE THROUGH THE SACRED STREETS, LISTENING TO MY HEARTBEAT, IN THE RECORD-BREAKING HEAT, WHEN WE WERE BORN IN TIME.

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:53:48 -0400

Four months have passed. I had left San Francisco and headed north. I had become obsessed with a Bob Dylan song, “Born in Time”, and I listened to it over and over again as circumstances brought me back home to my island in British Columbia and then onwards to Dawson City in the Yukon Territory; the land of the midnight sun, where visitors and locals ascend “The Dome” on summer solstice to watch the sun descend and ascend again in a few short hours. I had a satchel full of books and commitments for an editorial and interview, but most of my time was spent absorbing nature and sinking deeper and deeper into the sound and lyrics of Dylan’s song. It’s always interesting to me when a film, or book, or person, or quote, or photograph, or piece of music, summons you to explore its attraction, and at the best of times, casts a spell over you.

On the rising curve, where the ways of nature will test every nerve
You don’t get anything you don’t deserve, when we were born in time.

Writing this now, I know that all the work I’ve recently accomplished - personally, professionally, creatively - was a direct result of understanding what the song meant to me. The realization that most of my life, and all of my creative life, has been this dichotomy between the dream and the reality, the inspiration and the need to have it reach some kind of expression in the real. The relief I would sometimes feel when I wasn’t creating, and the inevitable malaise and hopelessness that would ensue after a period of just trying to live on the surface. The understanding that if you can live long enough, and strive hard enough, you can finally surrender to the artistic self, regardless of where that quest is leading or what it might yield. You create because you have to, and there is nothing you need in return. The Buddhists had a saying that you have to need to create, like a person whose hair is on fire needs to find water. How many people have I known that have had those epiphanies only to retreat at the first sign of opposition or fear of failure? How many artists have I known that wish their hair was ablaze? How many times did I stumble when I needed to stride?

In the hills of mystery, In the foggy web of destiny,
You can have what’s left of me, when we were born in time

So, early October, and the world is seemingly a realm of miracles and flashes of light and inspiration. From delivering lectures on Tarkovsky and Bergman, Bresson and Kubrick, to distant film festivals where beauty reigns supreme and young artists are changing the way we see and think, to a voyage today where whales and sea lions were cavorting in stormy seas, to upcoming travels to New York City where the future remains unwritten. Today marks the beginning of Hobo’s virtual presence and I speak primarily for Christian, Deborah and Shawn (with no shortage of love for those who have departed and since arrived) when I declare my gratitude and love for all that we’ve seen and done, and all that is left for us to pursue. And of course, my thanks to Bob Dylan who has been with me since “Mr. Tambourine Man” played a song for me. I feel like we are now truly born in time, and there is still so much we have left to dream. Salutations to all those students, friends, family and artists, who have helped me and us get this far, and may all of us continue to surrender to the miracles that sustain us.

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

The goal in life is to discover you’ve always been where you were supposed to be. I believe that....

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 01:00:00 -0400

The goal in life is to discover you’ve always been where you were supposed to be. I believe that. Especially now. This is where I’m supposed to be. This is the right place to start writing again. Or blogging. I guess I’ll discover the difference soon enough. I open the Borges I bought at City Lights last night and read: A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. Seriously, didn’t I just say the same? These things happen all the time and the more they happen, the more likely they are to happen. Serendipity. Synchronicity.

I’m sitting at an outdoor table at The Blue Danube coffee house. Clement Street, San Francisco. I’m reading a Film Comment interview with Jarmusch about The Limits of Control and have just picked up a copy of After Dark by Haruki Murakami at the Green Apple bookstore down the block. Jarmusch is talking about The Limits of Control being influenced by the poetry of Neruda and I’m reminded of Pablo writing, “I’m tired of being a man.” This reminds me of Bill Murray for some reason, Broken Flowers and Lost in Translation perhaps. I read further that Jarmusch’s latest story is centered around movies, music, science, Bohemians, drugs, and Bill Murray. This reminds me of where I am. Vertigo, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Stanford, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Kesey, Haight Ashbury. You can’t be in San Francisco and not be reminded of all of that. I look over to a Thai restaurant called the Burma Superstar, an apparently infamous culinary vortex, the lineups will start later that afternoon, and a girl sits down beside me. She stirs her coffee as her companion, the Japanese guy from Mystery Train, I swear that’s true!, smokes a cigarette and paces in front of her. Their dialogue goes something like this:

How long?
What? How long is what?
You and me, this.
This? Meeting for coffee, you and me?
6 years?
At least 7.
No way. 7?
I’m 35.
I’m 36.
We’re old.
You’re old.

He smokes and poses. She plays with her hair. Blonde. A California blonde via Detroit we find out. No one is from here. No one has parents here. No one has children. They couldn’t possibly talk this way without an audience. They’ve scanned my props and have generated their own Murakami Jarmuschian postures. I’m cast as their writer/director and the film will change when I leave. Laundry, finances, something less stylized, less written, less rehearsed. I pack up my sources and moving on can feel their postures sag. But none of this is likely true, they are as real as they’ve ever been. This is how they really talk. Did they become this way through films and books? Or did Jarmusch and Murakami create their cinematic poems from sitting at coffee shops not unlike this one? Or is it both? And does it matter? I think this blog might be pointed in the direction of deciphering that equation. My quest is to explore the question of, Are You Experienced, and decide who is and who isn’t. I was 12 when the album came out and there was no question of my namesake being experienced. And interesting that there was no question mark on the album cover. I wonder that if you could say, Are you experienced, and not think of it as a question, then maybe you are. So to the present where I recognize Jarmusch and Murakami as being experienced and wonder about their coffee shop offspring. Who is closest to the source?

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Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:28:00 -0400

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