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Auld Lang Syne (x10)

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on December 31, 2008

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So it’s almost the New Year and I can’t believe that I’m actually only starting to make use of the random itunes mix. I’m listening to Bellydance music from one of Kaeshi’s choreographies’, then Eminem and then Tori Amos and then a riff from Auld Lang Syne.

Oh, and I’m writing from Glenwood Springs, Colorado, btw.

Spent last night swimming in the legendary Hot Springs —the Utes believed doing these medicinal mineral baths provided ‘good medicine’ for the upcoming hunting season. Doc Holiday and plethoras of others, used them to try and cure Tuberculosis. Earlier that afternoon we’d hiked up to Doc’s grave stone—evidently the mineral baths hadn’t saved Doc in time…

Went to the Vapor Caves today, also part of the hot springs. Am getting ready now for a “Blue New Year” party at the Roxy, the only club in Glenwood. Don’t have much blue with me so will have to borrow. Watching the coverage of Times Square and its almost New Years in New York now; they’re all wearing blue as well. Just learned they’re dropping a bigger ball this year. Anyone know what happened to the previous one?

These are my top ten Auld Lang Syne Covers.
Happy New Year!!

Glen Erin Pipe Band

Aretha Franklin and Billy Preston

Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.

Robert Burns. 1759–1796

495. Auld Lang Syne

SHOULD auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to min’?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o’ lang syne?

We twa hae rin about the braes, 5
And pu’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d monie a weary fit
Sin’ auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl’t i’ the burn,
Frae mornin’ sun till dine; 10
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin’ auld lang syne.

And here ’s a hand, my trusty fiere,
And gie’s a hand o’ thine;
And we’ll tak a right guid-willie waught 15
For auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp,
And surely I’ll be mine;
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne! 20

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne.

GLOSS: gowans] daisies. fit] foot. dine] dinner-time. fiere] partner. guid-willie waught] friendly draught.

Earthrise Over the Holiday Hollywood Funk

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s000z

on December 24, 2008

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Am in a bit of a Holiday Hollywood Funk now. The script I spent a year working on and that was referred to as, “brilliant” is also, according to many those same folks who called it brilliant, too experimental to produce. Consequently it is not-commercially viable script. Perhaps I’m spoiled in that, up to this point, all of my scripts (excepting my last full-length stage-play) have been produced, multiple times, in some sort of capacity. Though on a much smaller scale, obviously. Still, the thought of all this work, yielding no results, w/out more or less, restarting from scratch, bums me out since it feels over and done and I’m really not sure whether or not I’m up to the task of starting up from scratch when I could just start an entirely new script, instead.

Forty years ago today, the Apollo 8 astronauts, the first humans to orbit the Moon, were taken by surprise, upon encountering the earthrise for the very first time. And I’ve been watching earthrise on my laptop here, in my mom’s Denver, Colorado living room, 40 years later just by clicking play on the You Tube stream.

Above Hollywood. Beyond Hollywood. Clouds passing. Rising above. Connecting and reconnecting with the root source of wonder. The startle-zing of Apollo 8’s first confrontation with this unmitigated beauty. The starkness of this new unfamiliar, familiarness.

There’s even a bonus clip — Earthset. Taken from a Japanese camera is hard to believe it’s footage of something that was really going on it’s just so small disk geometrical.

Happy Birthday, Earthrise. To those who’ve been following my blog as well as those who’ve only just jumped on, Happy Christmanukkah. Happy Eid, to those of your who observe Eid. Solstice, as well, obviously. And for any Buddhists reading this blog, not sure that there’s a specific holiday for you this time of year but, peace, health and happiness to you as well. Happy Kwanza to those Kwanza observers out there. And for Atheists, Happy Sir Isaac Newton’s Birthday, as his birthday does, indeed, fall on the 24th of December. (Though there is some contention as to whether to go by the Gregorian calendar or not, lets just assume the 24th, for consistency sake). Wishing all of you a Happy Earthrise Birthday and the best of everything in 2009.

Nothing but the Truth

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s000z

on December 17, 2008

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In Rod Lurie’s new film, Nothing But the Truth Judith Miller and Valerie Plame’s real life dramas, though identifiable, are heightened and reconfigured for maximum impact. A person who goes into this film expecting a dramatized retold bio pic will be disappointed. Instead, their stories are used as the foundation for a story that is it’s own autonomous entity; one that mines the depths of journalistic integrity. This autonomous entity is a smartly paced, brilliantly crafted political thriller; punctuated with the best reveal since Rosebud.

Alan Alda’s portrayal of a dedicated, loyal and insightful yet ultimately powerless Clarence Darrow type captures the best of his tragic/comedic genius. Kate Beckinsale hits each emotional note with piercing virtuosity. Writer and director, Rod Lurie refuses to pander to the docile demographic by dumbing down. Nothing but the Truth is an unapologeticaly fierce, complex and multifaceted confrontation. It succeeds where the sensationalistic sound bytes fail at giving an entirely new level of meaning to journalistic integrity, loyalty and sacrifice.

Driving to Denver in December (desert–>canyon–>snow)

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s000z

on December 11, 2008

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I’m on hiatus from LA until the end of January. Cleared outta my Burbank place and managed to fit it all into a 8×7x5 mobile pod that the Big Box Storage guy, Eddie, actually brought to my door, let me fill and then drove to a warehouse. The mobile pod had no number on it so there was this flash of wondering whether or not everything from my birth certificate to my pre-teen journals to my electric power drill would end up going the way of the lost Arc of the Covenant. But the moment quickly passed and I felt lighter than I had previously. Between now and the end of January –during which time I’ll be helping mom pack up the home in Denver she’s about to leave for five hours a day, and then spending another five hours a day writing two new screenplays and there will be little to nothing to distract me.

But now it’s a road with only my thoughts to distract. Well, that, and arguments with my mom. Mom, Dad, Alex and me used to do cross country road trips every summer when we were kids and Alex and I would actually get paid, in quarters, not to argue. We’d start each day w/ a maximum of seven quarters and then a quarter would get taken away whenever we’d have an argument or fight. And we got all over the country this way. Car bingo, books on tape and flash cards about the different states. Oh, and I’m actually proud to be able to say I’ve been to every single state, except for Florida. And whenever I say this to people they ask me why not Florida and I have nothing to respond, really, except that it’s a peninsula and therefore easy to miss.

Back to the desert, though. Back to the vast, vast, vastness you wont really ever be able to picture completely in your head. The space is just so difficult to conceptualize, even when in front of it, it’s simply easier to hang back and decide to think of the vastness in terms of time, instead. So I imagine those great big ice sheets pushing through the rocks, carving out the canyons and the valleys and then melting all away. Stayed the night in the Virgin River Casino that night, drove all day and then evening. We get out of the car at a scenic overlook to try and, once again, take in the extendo horizontal as it appears to be continually extendo-ing. We end up getting a nice picture snapped of the two of us. Mom and me looking nice. Got gas for only $1.51 here, can you believe?

Finally, Colorado. Colder still. Elevation climbing. White mountain peaks glow beneath a moon. Roads are icy and my Cali car, doing it’s best in this fresh new altitude, lacks the wheel and overall oomph power. Find a hotel for the night. Snowing the next day, but we set out anyway. Windshield wipers battling the precipitation straight on until finally, we’ve driven out of the cloud. The elevation is lower, slightly. Shift into low gear to avoid skids on the way down.

Photo of the vast, vast, vastness at the bottom of the page is of part of my latest obsession. Something my friends, as well as me are convinced is the direct result of Palin haiku withdrawal syndrome. That is, my obsession w/ the “six word story” that Earnest Hemingway popularized. So here’s my six word story:

Canyon interstates where glaciers once grew.

It’s the next day. I continue to think about those canyons, only I think about the back in time versions of those canyons. I think about those enormous glaciers, advancing and retreating sheets that defined this great horizontal over 12,500 years ago. And since you’re reading this now, I know you’re thinking about it as well. Perhaps not as obsessively as I have been. But you’re nevertheless thinking about it, anyway. Those long ago glaciers that carved out canyons, then melted away yet left their trace .

Confused and Distracted at the Pseudo Golden Globes

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s000z

on December 4, 2008

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Carly Milne was compiling a posse bunch of stellar scribes to pen a selection of several pseudo Golden Globe Acceptance speeches for an article she was writing for Variety. My friend Nikki, who’d recently connected me to our now mutual friend, Jamie, connected me to Carly and then, to my surprise, Carly offered me a spot in the all-star lineup. Several slots were offered to me and I opted for the “Confused and Distracted” one. Print version is published in the print edition of this week’s Variety magazine or by clicking on the link slightly above and to the left of the Golden Globe. Already tried and failed to embed the article on the page itself or to set link in the Golden Globe. Then the link I set directly above the Golden Globe just looked all disproportionate. Although the slightly above and to the left scenario is disproportionate also, by this time, I’d come to the realization that if I continue tweaking this, I might, might not end up w/ a more aesthetically pleasing blog post, this is immaterial, given the reality that if I don’t keep my perfectionist tendency in check, my perfectionism’ll suck up activities that ought to take priority such as paying bills, finding a storage unit to stash my stuff while I look for a new ‘cat friendly’ abode (know any landlords in LA looking for a clean and reliable tenant with a well behaved orange tiger tabby cat?), sending gifts to my friend’s who’ve just had babies, feedback to friends working on scripts and drumming up some new freelance writing gigs. Come to think of it, saying click on the link to read the article, might well have done the trick!
Showbiz writers rework award speeches

Poladroiding With Sun Tzu at The Standard

Published

s000z

on November 23, 2008

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The following Ten Image Poladroid Series rediscovers the ancient Sun Tzu on a West Hollywood Saturday night at The Standard…

It’s a Saturday night and I’ve finally got some a sliver of a moment to hang back and chill out with my new translation of The Art of War.

I’m reading it and remembering how life changing Sun Tzu was for me when I first discovered The Art of War in 2000.

But, my friend, Ariane has invited me to the Purple Lounge Party at The Standard. I’m really enjoying the read but at the same time, I want to circulate and consequently I am all conflicted about what to do.

The lure of The Standard’s acutely self-aware retro decor pulls me in with its tractor beam.

The change of pulsebeat; the longing to circulate…

Utter the word “Lush” at the door of the Purple Lounge for free entry.

I run into a friend who wants to know what I did this evening, prior to The Purple Lounge and I tell him I was reading Sun Tzu.

He asks what Sun Tzu writes about. I explain that it is about how to co-exist with conflict in a way that is mindful and balanced. Then I add, that the most successful war is a war that does not need to be fought.

Then, several minutes later, a push and a shove. An argument. Neither of the two is willing to back down. Throwing my arms around the taller of the two, I twist him out of harms way and he graciously thanks me for the intervention. While my 5′3 height and 105 pound body weight didn’t provide a lot of physical mass to leverage, no one expected me to do what I did. Thus, the element of surprise.

Would I try this again under similar circumstances? Actively involve myself in someone else’s conflict like this? Hard to tell.

Stranger things have happened to people who’ve read Sun Tzu, I guess.

Dr. Atomic

Published

s000z

on November 8, 2008

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Saw Dr. Atomic, written/directed by Peter Sellars and composed by John Adams, screened in a movie theater in Woodland Hills this morning as the matinee was being performed live at the Met. The ending, so softly humanizing. Rather than startle you with the impact of the inevitable explosion this entire opera is leading up to, it brings you inside Oppenheimer’s intellectual and emotional dreamscapes.

atomic As the team at Los Alamos gets closer and closer to the actual test, the dreamscapes bleed together. Something terrifying and inevitable is moving towards them which they have no more control over than they do the desert thunderstorm.

I’m going to try and assemble some of this, to try and give a sense. Of course, I didn’t get the full experience myself because I saw it in a movie theater and not at the Met. Hopefully, at some point, Dr. Atomic and I will find ourselves in the same city at the same time. In the meantime, I’ll post photos and text since I can’t say much beyond what the opera itself says.

Much of the text from the opera was adapted from declassified U.S. government documents and communications among the scientists, government officials, and military personnel who were involved in the project. Other borrowed texts include poetry by Baudelaire, John Donne, and Muriel Rukeyser, the Bhagavad Gita, and a traditional Tewa Indian song. Marvin Cohen, head of the American Physical Society, has criticized some parts of the libretto for not being strictly scientifically correct, in particular the opening lines (below). [1]

The opening chorus is an incomplete excerpt from the 1945 Smyth Report:

“Matter can be neither created nor destroyed but only altered in form.

Energy can be neither created nor destroyed but only altered in form.”

Act I concludes with an aria sung by Oppenheimer with text from Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV:

Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason yhour viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely’I love you, and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie:
Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

Kitty Oppenheimer’s aria, “Easter Eve, 1945″, by Muriel Rukeyser is from her poem of the same name.

The Act II, scene iii chorus, borrowed from the Bhagavad Gita (translated into English by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood) reads:

At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous,
Full of mouths and eyes, feet, thighs and bellies,
Terrible with fangs, O master,
All the worlds are fear-struck, even just as I am.
When I see you, Vishnu, omnipresent,
Shouldering the sky, in hues of rainbow,
With your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring-
All my peace is gone; my heart is troubled.

Act II is peppered with a repeated refrain from Pasqualita, the Oppenheimer’s Tewa Indian housemaid. The text comes from a traditional Tewa song:

In the north the cloud-flower blossoms
And now the lightning flashes
And now the thunder clashes
And now the rain comes down! A-a-aha, a-a-aha, my little one.
In the west the cloud-flower blossoms
And now the lightning flashes
And now the thunder clashes
And now the rain comes down! A-a-aha, a-a-aha, my little one.

And now the rain comes down! A-a-aha, a-a-aha, my little one.

One of the only scenes of actual connection (though still full of loneliness and longing) is Baudelaire’s “A Hemisphere in Your Hair” is used verbatim in the scene w/ Kitty Oppenheimer:

A Hemisphere in Your Hair

Long, long let me breathe the fragrance of your hair. Let me plunge my face into it like a thirsty man into the water of a spring, and let me wave it like a scented handkerchief to stir memories in the air.

If only you knew all that I see! all that I feel! all that I hear in your hair! My soul voyages on its perfume as other men’s souls on music.

Your hair holds a whole dream of masts and sails; it holds seas whose monsoons waft me toward lovely climes where space is bluer and more profound, where fruits and leaves and human skin perfume the air.

In the ocean of your hair I see a harbor teeming with melancholic songs, with lusty men of every nation, and ships of every shape, whose elegant and intricate structures stand out against the enormous sky, home of eternal heat.

In the caresses of your hair I know again the languors of long hours lying on a couch in a fair ship’s cabin, cradles by the harbor’s imperceptible swell, between pots of flowers and cooling water jars.

On the burning hearth of your hair I breathe in the fragrance of tobacco tinged with opium and sugar; in the night of your hair I see the sheen of the tropic’s blue infinity’ on the shores of your hair I get drunk with the smell of musk and tar and the oil of coconuts.
Long, long, let me bite your black and heavy tresses. When I gnaw your elastic and rebellious hair I seem to be eating memories.

The best You Tube clip I could find was from the Amsterdam performance so the subtitles are in Dutch. The stage at the Met was more impressive (in my opinion) in the vertical dynamics. Is nevertheless worth checking out this clip, to get a sense..

Popular Demand

Published

s000z

on November 8, 2008

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Relevant Posts

Haiku 101

Not really sure how to organize this now but enough people have either:

(a.) continued to haiku
(b.) suggested that I repost the haikus
(c.) made haiku pilgrimages to my site from some remote, far off regions of the world, like France, only to discover find an “error message” and a void to contemplate in negative 5-7-5

I have therefore been persuaded to repost. I watched the haiku collection flourish, nurtured and cultivated them because they inspired me. Therefore, no arm twisting is required to persuade me to re-publish.

Unless inspired to begin a new haiku project, however, this will be the last political haiku post of the Election 2008 Haiku collection. Please note that the final haiku of the series, written by Peter Orvetti, does not mean that the editor, in any way, shape, or form, condones a Palin/Palin ticket in 2112. May it serve as a reminder of the transitory nature of victory as well as a reminder to stay alert and not to take victory for granted.

Peter Orvetti Haiku

Bye elections poems
It was fun but now it’s done
Palin Twenty-Twelve!

Spinning Poi –aka– Firedancing

Published

s000z

on November 6, 2008

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So you put twist tightly wrapped kevlar around a pair of chains, weave the band around your fingers and practice figure eights. A lot of them. Keep practicing. Practice till you’re bored. Post bored. Totally sick of it. Just keep practicing. s000zPoi-1 Muscle memory kicks in. Just keep practicing. Eventually, you are ready to light. And the sound, ah, the sound. Fire whizzing past your ear, the power of your own inertia. The light, the light, the light! The s000zpoi3 glow inside lasts for days. In fact, once you’ve done this, you’re never the same again. My friend Charity taught me everything I know about Firedancing. She lives in Tuscon now but had a transfer in LA, we only had about an hour by the time we reached the Santa Monica Pier. s000zpoi2 One moment we’re trying to figure out whether or not we had enough Fiji water in the bottle to wet the safety towel and the next moment, we’re collapsed on the sand laughing. OMG, the world’s largest water supply is right in front of us!! I run to into this receding tide. My legs keep running, running, running. The Pacific’s night tide’s edge is just so far back. My toes sinking into in the cold wet seaweed and sand. I drench the towel in salt water. Jumping up, utter delight, I run back. We’re dipping the kevlar into the lamp oil now. Circling, figure eights all around. And oh, the sound! As I spin poi, Charity Charity Poi stands by w/ wet towel, in case of mishap. As she spins poi, I do the same. Two guys in uniform approaching. Were we too close to the Santa Monica Pier’s Ferris Wheel? How could we possible be a threat to anyone? Here were are, dancing with fire in the middle of this ginormous kittly litter box!! “What’s going on?” We tell them the truth; that we didn’t know whether or not it was illegal to spin poi on the beach and that Charity actually has a liscence to do this (which she does, insurance as well!) The two uniformed guys are laughing. “We’re EMTs” they explain to us, pointing to their white rectangular ambulance parked way, way, back.” We show them the wet towel to legitimate that we treat our craft with respect. Standby, one another, ready, in a heartbeat, to smother flames, if necessary. “No worries” they assure us. “Just stopped by to watch the show.” Was just one of those nights where even the smallest minute detail just clicks into place. The world around morphs into timelessness macro mode of it’s own accord and everything, everything, everything, just seems to make sense. Santa Monica Ferris Wheel Poladroid of Charity