rylance dances

curtain call

cultural activism, part 71

Peter Sellars - Cultural Activism in the New Century
ABC TV,
August 19, 1999

Peter Sellars:

The main thing of course is this question of how do we deal with people, things, aspects of life that do object to us, people who actually want to kill you, people who have a very different idea of what the right next thing to do in life would be, people who in short are not like us. People who you know we tell ourselves they're terrorists, they're this, they're that, we have our names for why we won't deal with them. But here they are, they're not going anywhere, and maybe we're the ones that need to go somewhere. This question of how it is we take in that thing which is most opposed to us and who we are, who we think we might be, and that who we might be, who we think we might be part is maybe a conclusion we reached prematurely, maybe there is more to come in our lives, and maybe too early on we accepted a certain identity, and maybe life has something larger in store.

Are we open to that, or are we closed to that? Every day the entire world is knocking trying to change your life and say wait a minute, you have no clue yet. And if you're living well the challenges get more and more frightening.

What I'm really interested in is theatre and artistic practice as a way forward in a period where shall we say the major international issue is security, where the banking system was set up on the basis of security, where a whole series of things were told national security requirement, and of course the surprise is there is no security. The Bank of Australia has demonstrated that very profoundly. Life isn't about security at all, something else has been prepared for us.

I attended this last week here in Adelaide a very powerful show about the working class and whether we're afraid of it or not. And of course I took that very personally because coming to direct the Adelaide Festival where it says on every number-plate, 'South Australia the Festival State', and you say ok we have a cultural obligation to participate in the lives of everyone with a bumper. What role are we playing in the lives of working class people? What role are we playing in the lives of working class people who are for example out of work? Human productivity is a cultural question before it's an economic one. What does it mean that people are motivated and empowered to create, to shape their environment, to shape their destiny instead of simply respond to conditions that are imposed?

At what point does one engage at the root of a problem what it means when we say depression? Depression is an economic term, it's a very powerful term at the end of this century. I come from a country that has the best economy it has ever had in its history. The American economy dominates 50 per cent of the world economy, and these are the good times. Now how is it that in the good times just about once a week there is a massacre in an American city. Just about once a week now. Your kids are trying to kill each other. And you can drop bombs anywhere you like all over the world because you have no official enemies left who can tell you to stop except your own kids, except the person next door who takes out a sawn-off shotgun. A culture of violence, it is so deep.

And I accepted this job in Australia because Australia is at this beautiful moment, shall we say it's a little behind and that's a plus! And I'm here to say don't go there! The results are in. These are no longer ideological questions and can no longer be treated as an ideological battlefield. The issues of multiculturalism, the issues of reconciliation, the issues of the cultural faces whereby we don't kill each other are not ideological, they are human. And we are talking about the function of the humanities in building a society where there might actually be safety, where security is based on an understanding among peoples not who has the biggest army for the moment. Where security is based on the ability to talk, to share and to be honest across very painful hugely controversial ugly questions. And instead of just skirting around them and acting like they'll go away because they won't, how you address them directly with the people concerned. Not make policy on behalf of those people because you know what's good for them. We've had a terrifying period of that which is now I hope thankfully drawing to a close. Very good intentions based on profound, profound uninformed cultural viewpoints.

What one generation thinks is the way to help turns out to be viewed by a later generation as an atrocious gesture. How could you take children from their parents systemically for generations? How could you think that would be helpful? People genuinely did. Proudly. Proudly. Fine people, proudly did something that a later generation regards as an atrocity and for which we are paying the price over and over and over and over and over. Now we all think of ourselves as fine people, we're good we know that. How is that we can begin to interact with people in a way that's not cultural destructive. Getting past the ideological barriers into a place where actual communication's possible.

I was very interested to see this show about the working class two nights ago. It's amazing the word 'working-class', who is everyone else and I'm just still trying to figure that out. And it was interesting seeing actors trying to deal with the troubles of young homeless teenagers on a theatre stage. In fact in Los Angeles where I come from we've been engaging in a form of theatre that is slightly more direct and I know there are some examples in Australia but I just want to give some examples I'm familiar with. There's one important theatre company called 'Los Angeles Poverty Department - LAPD and it's a theatre of and by homeless people on skid row in Los Angeles. Those of you who have visited skid row in Los Angeles know it's not a very pretty sight, mostly only visited because you got lost downtown where every two blocks turns into a fresh nightmare. Downtown Los Angeles is shocking because the giant world headquarters of the company that is responsible for our fabulous economic success stands next to a row of refrigerator boxes which are filled every night. Every morning at five am city workers come with hoses and hose the boxes down to get the people who are sleeping in them off the street and throw the boxes away. So one of the tasks of a homeless person in Los Angeles is to find a new box every day. So they work hard. And we've solved the homeless problem in some way and the city of San Francisco, the new mayor, Willie Brown has decided to give them ticket citations fining them, fining a homeless person 75 dollars for remaining in the same place longer than five minutes, that is the solution to homelessness. And I wish I could say it's a crackpot proposal, it is law, and it is currently being enforced.

Now I come from a country that in the late 20's and early 30's took people who were out of work and asked them to build new roads, new hospitals, new schools, new libraries, new post offices and build a country, and build the infrastructure of a great country. And all of those people out of work in the Depression built the America that could enter World War 2 heroically. And right now in city after city, town after town the finest architecture is the school that was built by the WPA, Works Progress Administration workers. Homeless and jobless people who are given a home and a job and a purpose and said let's build the society together.

What's being built in America in the next five years is 13-billion dollars of new prisons. We now have the largest prison population in the world, and we're defunding the schools at the same time. The three strikes rule and if you ever hear anybody here say the word zero tolerance please show them zero tolerance. Three strikes means the third time you're arrested and convicted for anything no matter what you are put in prison for the rest of your life. This is happening to young 19-20 year old individuals who you know get caught with small drug doses or something and of course right now in the last year in California we've had cases of someone getting their third strike for stealing chocolate chip cookies, for stealing a slice of pizza, a young man goes to prison for the rest of his life. The same bill that introduced this removed all educational programs from the prisons, so you can spend your life there but not get an education. This law is applied 17 times more frequently to people of colour than to other people.

I'm saying these things because again the statistics, the results are in. Please don't think this is some wild idea being proposed, this has been on the law books and has been enforced and we have the results. So you're talking about images of success and images of failure, and you're talking about a city you'd like to live in, a society you want your children to grow up in, and you're talking about who's safe and why and what will it take to make everyone safe. You're talking about security.

Los Angeles Poverty Department did an amazing thing. It made shows with homeless people in which a lot of the things that came out in the show that's right now at the festival centre, came out but they were not spoken by actors, they were actually spoken by homeless people who themselves had experienced the things they were talking about. Now two things are very important. One is you know if you've talked to a homeless person much, homeless people tend to be loners and to tend talk in monologue or not talk at all, and it's a rather asocial gesture and when you learn where people came from, what happened that made them decide to leave everything, or the violence with which everything left them, it's pretty shocking. It's an extreme human state, and yet in other societies say old Russia, India, these are holy people. You look into the eyes of the homeless wandering person and you see the face of God. And in society after society this is a divine presence entering your life. The traditional Russia is how you take care of the holy fool.

LAPD's performances are wild events because you don't know from night to night who's going to show up to perform. You don't know how long they're going to decide to go tonight, crazy. The performances themselves put everyone in the room at risk, and yet the main risk has been in your whole life that you're too scared to go up to a homeless person, and when you see a homeless person you walk by them without looking, and act like you didn't see them. And a Los Angeles Poverty Department performance you find yourself for a couple of hour in the room with the very people you were trying not to see or deal with. And of course in this age of exploitation politics people like homeless people are used by certain politicians as a way to whip up a public storm, and so we have a giant debate about what to do about all those people on welfare. The debate which of course is held among people who are not on welfare, and we never actually hear from the people who are on welfare at all. The shocking thing in America was for the homeless debate to be taken up by homeless people where for the first time actually you're talking to somebody who is homeless about the reality rather than a series of judgments that have been passed by a series of other people who are paid to deal with them.

The shock of these performances is the information you get has nothing to do with the information you've read about or have seen on the made-for-tv movie of the person in a raincoat lurching through the street. In fact none of the stereotypes are true. In fact as you start to learn about who people are and what is moving through their lives, you change completely your attitude to how to deal with the homeless question, and what that question is in your life. And you will vote differently next time.

What's it about? Well if I may use the term in investigative lecture or as I like to think of it, the instigator address, it's about primary research. It's about most everything in our lives we have learned at a distance, twice removed, we're busy judging somebody that we saw for ten seconds on television, we say oh that person. What do you know about that person - nothing - does that stop you from making your judgment? No. If you stop and ask yourself how much you actually know from personal experience of most opinions you have, you would find that most of your opinions are utterly worthless. And yet they're the basis for voting, for social policy, for deciding what's good for other people, etc., etc., etc.

The arts are about primary experience. The arts are not about a move, the arts are about eclipsing the distance, the arts are about saying you're now in that person's shoes, the arts are about understanding that someone else's problem is your problem, and that probably your own problems which you're not telling anyone about are way closer to that person in the street than you're willing to admit. And the fact that you won't admit that means that you can't deal with your own problems either.

So the question in the arts is how you break through this wall that we all have, this mediatised wall that prevents most of us from engaging in our real environment and changing it, entering it directly, experiencing it totally, not through a membrane but actually touching. Actually saying we're all here for each other, and whatever needs to be changed or fixed or adjusted in the world is the same thing that always needed to be adjusted. You know that actually the problem of being human hasn't changed at all. I mean yes we have computers but so what? Because that's not the real issue. And yes society goes fast supposedly. I think I may have mentioned I did a concert last year with a great Indian Dhrupad player, profound man who sings on a single tone for an hour. And when I met him I said well you know you practice this very very slow artform, what is that like in this very fast society? And he said to me life is always slow, it's just your brain that's fast. And I think you know when you talk to people who are trying to deal on an Aboriginal issue with Aboriginal people and say oh it's taking forever. Yes, yes, correct, hopefully, because God knows future generations are not going to be proud of our quick fixes, they're nothing to brag about. The question is what will it take to allow ourselves to do something slowly, to spend the time that it takes to make a friend, to spend the time that it takes to establish trust, to spend the time that it actually takes to learn and the process be transformed before we're so intent on transforming everything else.

So these performances at Los Angeles Poverty Department are shocking and crazy theatre and unprofessional. The Los Angeles Times refuses to review them, and for me it's the only interesting theatre in Los Angeles, but they say oh they're unprofessional. I want to say thank God! We have seen the professionals. What I try and tell my students is my generation was told you had to have a career, so we all got one quickly, and the problem is about 50 years later where did our lives go? Fortunately the next generation doesn't have that problem, there are no careers. Therefore find something you care about and do it! And use the arts as an act of practice, poetry is about the root is to make or to do, not to react but to make or to do. And I was thrilled by this Steven Sondheim performance that began the evening. This whole question of having a vision is not enough, you have to have the execution. Well in the society that started to execute people I could use a little more vision, and frankly that's what's of interest because anything worth doing in life we will not accomplish in our lifetimes. Something valuable is defined by the fact that it is unattainable, but you don't know how to get there. The things you understand and the things that are within reach are therefore by definition of less value. And it's when we're trying to do the things that are beyond our reach that are going to have to be handed on to the next generation because we can't complete them at all that something important is touched.

And we live in a period where we have these horrifying consultancies that are based on outcomes - define in the next two and a half minutes what will the outcome be? Aboriginal outcomes have been coming for a long time and are just getting underway, because what we're learning in the speedy society is people need something slow. We're learning in fact that there's a hunger for something that doesn't just have profit but that actually has value and they're not the same. How do you add value in the life of a city? You don't build the giant hotel and tell the artist you have this little corner over there and then you have this giant monstrosity in the middle of a city built by people with a heart of ice right in the heart of a city. They're the coldest buildings ever seen, frigid, unbelievably cold. You can't believe the coldness of what this generation is building. What will it take to create the sense of beauty, surprise, shock, splendour, mystery and fun of the botanical gardens again, something fabulous, you'd just love to be there, you go there and you feel profound well-being. What would it be like for us to invest our public spaces not with another stupid illiterate corporate geometry, but profound well-being, a place where people want to be, and where just to be there is to be different. You're another person when you go in there because the space itself invites you to be human, invites you into a world of mystery, invites you into a world of surprise, invites you into an imaginary world that you would love to live in, keeps fantasy alive in the heart of the city, says ok we know what the facts are but now can we do something more interesting than the facts. Because as we all know the facts will be discredited in about another 25 minutes, there'll be another set of facts. So if you're pinning what you're doing on the facts, sorry for you.

And the question is how can we now put back at the centre of our artistic practice what has formed the power of artistic practice through history but has been missing hugely in the last generation, which is very simply social justice. You have without social justice no Sophocles, no Shakespeare, no Maurier - these are the people who put the issue of social justice at the centre not at that margin. Shakespeare called his theatre the globe, not the corner. Shakespeare was about thinking globally about finding your place in the world creatively, not making something like they have in Chicago and say now we'll bring it to Adelaide, but to find what it is here that is a real future. The reason I came to Australia was the no vote for Pauline Hanson, because in the last five years every other major industrialised nation has voted yes to the 'attack the immigrants platform and to shut the borders platform'. Australia said after huge debate let's stay open, so I came, I said I really want to be with people like that who are resisting the pressure of xenophobia, of hatred, of mistrust, of closed doors, of privileged zones. And say yes, let us open ourselves to refugees because of course we're all refugees, and until you notice how you yourself are a refugee, you are clueless about your own life, what are you running from, what were you rejected from, how has that formed you. And then how many ways have you had to reimagine home across your life, for yourself and for people you care about.

So this question of cutting the budget for the arts which is what I come from in America, I just want you to know that the results are clear. Now in Australia you're dealing with a very crucial issues, this report has just come out - the Nugent Report - and it's about funding excellence. I am outraged at the cupidity of this approach. My attitude is the only good footy teams are Essendon and Kangaroos and everyone else should be eliminated because they don't win often enough. The crows may have been good once but sorry, they've got to go based on this seasons' record! Only feed your children on the days they do well in school! What are we talking about? We're talking about culture, culture is cultivation, culture is you've got to cultivate everything around you because you don't know where the next excellence or surprise will ever come from, and therefore is impartial, generous and a continuous activity where actually the very thing that you didn't have any hope for at all turns out to be the very thing that we're all eating dinner off of ten years from now. And what we're talking about is generating energy in a society where people are feeling stagnant and powerless, and we're talking about how you move beyond this state of social paralysis into a mode of activism which is about a movement. Any movement is not about this or that individually brilliant person, a movement is a movement, and right now we're all suffering from the nightmare of this highly individualised approach to everything, right? You have a problem, it's your problem because nobody else has that problem. What? And you're successful, that's your personal success, you fought for it and please kick everyone else who's coming behind you on the ladder back. And you want to say none of us has a success unless that success is a success that is shared through the whole society.

And you want to say that probably some of the most awesome and beautiful and powerful things we can do will fail. Martin Luther King failed. I would rather be Martin Luther King than a lot more successful people. No, he didn't eradicate racism, no, it didn't work, and yes, his life was glorious and people will always tell about it. With Romeo and Juliet it didn't work out. Hamlet is not a success story! Oedipus Rex not quite! Why is it that the myths are about the people for whom it didn't work out, because we're on this earth to do something more than succeed. If all you can do is succeed, sorry about that. The question is how do we go to a zone where failure is certain and where that is the only effort that is worth handing on to the next generation who will pick up wherever we leave off and move forward? I'm very impressed with this generation, one of the reasons I teach is because I am thrilled to be around young people who are not slackers and are not apathetic, but are so much smarter and more energised than I was at their age, I am very impressed. My students in America are stunning. No they're not marching down the street with a banner, they're just in an AIDS hospice four days a week, they're teaching maths to students in a part of the city where they have no textbooks. You find something that needs to be done and you do it, it's a two-step process, and it is what you'd owed your life to, because what we're talking about is not a career, but lifework. If you succeed at it after two years, sorry. It's like in rehearsal when a scene is really great in the first week of rehearsal I think oh well, it's too bad, there it goes. Opening night it will be horrible! Meanwhile the scene in the show that you're trying to cut that everybody says this just doesn't work, this is bad, we can't, you're trying everything on earth, it's a disaster - opening night everyone says how did you do that? I'll never forget it. It was our nightmare.

So this idea of learning to live with your nightmare as opposed to learning to run from it, is this task of culture. If I could put it more possibly, also in terms of the festival, because I'm very proud to work on this festival in Adelaide, because I think of a festival as something that's not imposed upon indigenous culture but indeed is a form of indigenous culture. Indigenous peoples all over the world never had subscription seasons. You did something when it was necessary, you were responding to a need, you were marking a moment in peoples' lives that needed to be marked, somebody is born, somebody's married, somebody dies, somebody's business has a crisis and so you create around it a ritual space. The image I have and I will use with apologies because I'm from American still, although that's changing every day, is from native American tradition - but in order to live one more day you need to kill a buffalo. Now most of these human beings were in denial about where the resources come for us to live another day, we don't actually want to think about who made the t-shirt that's touching you right now, or you know my nike shoes which are worn in memory of my fabulous trip with the Australian String Quarter on the Strezlecki last week - were in fact made in China by Chinese prisoners so you could say, no you couldn't say it it's a true statement, that the fingers of Chinese prisoners are touching my feet right now. If you actually trace out what you're touching and what's touching you, there's a fair amount of history that we're all implicated in. And as the part of the world the ten per cent of the world that consumes 85 per cent of the worlds' resources, it's important to be able to trace out what kind of sacrifices had to be made for us to be here. In native American tradition, if a buffalo has to die to feed you you create a ritual whereby first you contact the spirit of that buffalo and you offer thanks. You recognise that every day living beings are making sacrifices for us to be here. Now if you think about that, you commit to your life differently, you can't waste a day, you can't not respond to that sacrifice of a being died for you to be here, every day.

So there's a ceremony. There's also a ceremony because hunting the buffalo is a complicated thing. A buffalo hunt is a very elaborate thing that requires that our skills are at an extreme hype of preparation. Athletic skills, mental skills and courage, perception, insight - all of these skills need to be honed so there needs to be a ceremony where the community together hones those skills that will be required to survive tomorrow. In the process of the ceremony on the wall of the cave people paint a buffalo. It's not that somebody walked into that cave and said, gee it could use a buffalo over there, very nice. The first artwork was not a decorator impulse, it was a gesture towards survival, it was what is the most essential thing to survival - how do we put this at the front of our minds and consciousness into our bodies as practice, acknowledging what it means to take a life and therefore what our life has to offer the world in return. And the next day you hunt a buffalo and the village eats.

Art is about drawing that buffalo and creating that ceremony. The question for the next generation is what is the buffalo look like? And can we create a ceremony that is inclusive enough, that lifts all of our consciousness and all of our skills to the level that they need to be at? Survivability in Australia is not about discovering the next coal mine, it's about ecologically sustainable futures which Australia's the first place on the planet that is both industrialised enough and ecologically sensitive enough to pioneer. Our future here is ecologically sustainable future. The power of Adelaide is the beautiful quality of life, the beautiful quality of life is a moral scientific and social justice issue is what South Australia has to offer the rest of the world. Our task is to image the next sustainable survivable society.

So I'm in a period now where I'm no longer doing shows that have unhappy endings. I used to do shows that were angry, that said oh, everything's wrong, everything's messed up, this is corrupt, that's corrupt. I stopped doing that. First of all because if that really qualifies as news then we're in trouble, but more than that it's exactly the crisis of what does qualify as news. Is the only thing that's news is something that's negative? Somebody gets hurt, it's news. We now need an alternative information system for the actual news, and the actual news is when somebody's able to accomplish something. The actual news is not the next gesture of violence. The actual breakthroughs are not violent from now on at all. But they take living through some violence to get to. At the end of Hamlet it's not a pretty picture, everyone who you followed all night long is lying there dead and dying. The message is please don't do this, you will poison yourself and kill your friends. And then miraculously at the end all these dead people stand up and take a bow. No-one actually had to die for us to learn not to do that, please don't poison yourself and kill your friends. The arts can be used as the way in which you create the new paradigm and nobody has to die, nobody has to lose their home, and yet we can create the hypothetical example of how else could we do this. What are the alternatives? Can we experiment? What are human beings like under the following conditions? We need to know, because there's a whole lot about what human beings are like that we truly don't know.

And at a period where traditional religious practice is not engaged in across the society the question is what are the moral yardsticks. How do we say to each other this would be right, that would be wrong. Sophocles made a play about how you treated the prisoners in the last war, about teenagers killing their parents, and it's not an exploitation issue for tabloid journalism, it's about the deepest human question that could be asked. It's about how deeply we want to look at anything that's happening to us, or do we want to look away. So we're coming through a period of what could be called 'distraction culture', where most things most people go to is just to let the time go by and to not have to focus. I'm now proposing the new period is the culture of focus, is the culture of now let's just stop all this, and let's focus on what requires our attention.

We're going to use the Adelaide Festival as a point of focus for this country and that is going to attract the world's attention, because the issues that need to be discussed need to be discussed everywhere. I would like to think here in Australia and this next generation we have an amazing opportunity to take a leadership role and to face the issues that are urgent all around the planet. And to face them here with courage, invention, skill - the hard part, and generosity. This is the moment where Australia moves into a leadership role, not following, because we've seen enough examples, we need new ones. Cultural life will be our laboratory, the research and development wing needs to be supported and let's build the next society. Thank you.

And let me add one more thing, I know I'm not supposed to and probably this is violating the television program, the point of all this is that the members of Los Angeles Poverty Department, the theatre company of homeless people are no longer homeless. Thank you.

(Peter Sellars, American theatre director)


(from the australian broadcasting company)

you can also check out a pbs interview with him here.

but here is him at his utmost, directing julius caeser by handel:
youtube

odetta

you absolutely have to go and listen to her speak on this interview video, its totally important and beautiful.

she reminds me so much of my voice teacher in college, fran bennett. she didnt teach singing, i dont know how folks are supposed to learn to sing other than just opening their mouths to sing, but she taught voice for the stage, which i mainly remember as these awesome warm up exercises for the throat (non vocal) and the neck and spine and body--man she was a great teacher (prob still is). but this woman odetta led the charges on the world stage so you gotta hear her in her own words and hear her sing, she lets spirit take it over. i love that.

"if you can't fly, run. if you can't run, walk. if you can't walk, crawl. any way you can make it baby, you keep on moving it on."

moon in the seventh house

if yours is, like mine, and you'd know what i was talking about if you were lucky like me and had a friend named tam in high school who gave you the down low on these things, you'd be sittin... well, if not pretty then at least looking at a pretty sky tonight.

there is the most amazing lineup and i can't find any real info on it online but... looks like a venus conjunct jupiter (learn the language, man) with the moon in spitting distance, and that, my friends, is just plain:

a good-lookin' sky ;)

i thought i was either:

1 premenstrual
2 crazed about finishing this record
3 just going off my nut

all day, totally unable to be civil period. but then, i stepped out onto the porch, and looked up, and in the clear cold sky, there was this amazing sight, which has been developing for days: two pretty planets tucked even closer to the crescent moon than over the weekend, just hanging delicately, barely hanging, so delicately.

my friend judith would have a lot to say about this. i know my friend tam does, gotta give her a call ;)

im not proud, or tired

you can get anything you want
at alice's restaurant

amazing playlist (no im not referring to my stuff) over at crossroads bob's for this past sunday, it was an allout fun fest ;) check it out! i had never heard the entire alice's restaurant before, that was a hoot ;)

fallout

so chinese democracy got panned by the times today, after all that time money and effort. how rude! makes a person nervous to get reviews, but i havent heard any of the record yet. 17 years, dude! i thought my marriage was a long time! wow. and also ry cooder takes a trip through the mojave and all his retrospective, jennifer anniston talks about going to the rudolf steiner school in nyc and how she wasnt allowed to watch tv either, and david lynch apparently is reporting the weather from his painting studio in la via the internet-- and discussing the vast ocean of consciousness in each of us. see if i ever open the sunday times again, usually they just sit there in a blue plastic bag for weeks before getting designated to the window washing department unread. ok: i actually do open them, remove the book section, the magazine, the headlines and maybe the arts but i dont ACTUALLY read them they just decorate the coffee table.

whew.

on the other hand. our very own vice president is being indicted in a prison-income, abuse of prisoners scheme, and the french are considering bringing charges of bribery, money-laundering and misuse of corporate assets in another pretty halliburton situation, this time in nigeria. all's i can say is, let's make sure to help our leadership lead this time around, shall we?

lucky girl

so. the records up on the austin music download site, but NB! NB! (cant remember the last time i saw those initials: nota bene (abbreviation) meaning to take special note (used to precede a written note). [ORIGIN: Latin.]):these are samples online only until the next few days when the whole thing'll be uploaded in final form. they're going up one at a time but just wanted to get the samples up and the lovely folks over at AMD have been mighty patient and kindly about our drawn out release... ;)

[NB: The finals are up at jenniferleonhardt.com, 12/1/08]

anyway, here's the linkolas to the music, keep your shoes shined and your nose in the air!

austinmusicdownload.com
myspace
jenniferleonhardt.com

i have the good fortune to be working with some very precise and exacting people on this thing and good thing, you'd be listening to mud otherwise. if you're listening. and if you're not---why not!!!!!!!! some good sh*t on there, people who know how to make sound sound good. im super happy about it, but hang tight, the finals'll be up here shortly.

meantime again, it's freezing! had to bring my potted geranium, my paris red, in and set it down in the living room so it would survive. i dont know if it's a biannual or perennial but frankly im performing a ghoulish experiment and hoping to make it last a long time. it's bursting red flowers at present thanks to this mild november--well, not mild anymore. what i want is overflowing window boxes, man, and digitalis and belladonna and hypericum and lavendula and rosamarinus officinalis, dude. and buttercups and dandelions. hell yeah.

plus, and dont forget: this sunday over on 89.9 FM KYRS out of spokane washington (that's www.kyrs.org or www.myspace.com/crossroadsatkyrs), crossroad bob will be doing a show on (capitol letters here) Emerging Independent Artists, which a great turn of phrase and he is kind enough to include some tunes of mine in there- so join us on sunday at 1 PM PST (that's west coast time, apply your differences as needed) for some new music and i'm making the pancakes. oh, and coffee.

where will you be tuesday night?

i'll be here, how 'bout you?

The Parlor 9-11:30 PM
100 E North Loop Blvd.
78751

spam

according to my junk email, i am a very fat ("See Jennifer to drop as much weight as you possibly can! Try TriSlim!") older gentleman with erectile dysfunction ("Rock her world with your huge member viagra") who needs a date ("Meet your Match!"), a cash advance ("60 seconds process! SuperFastPayAdvance"), an education ("New online diploma for you") and a new career ("Help solve crimes: Jennifer is it in your DNA?").

i won't let it go to my head.

meanwhile, LA is burning:

puppets

go here:

http://austinlivetheatre.blogspot.com/2008/10/puppetry-in-austin-austin-statesman-of.html

trouble, baby ;) the run ends this sunday.

my old neighborhood:

sunset junction

the great jubilee

i live in a very happy neighborhood ;)

final mile

so i finally cleaned my house this weekend, first time really in six weeks. serious. dust bunnies and just dust, and i used the times sports section from back in sept to polish up the bathroom glass. i like to move everything around quarterly so its something i do anyway thoroughly when the season changes but this was major overdue. i have some amazing immune boost emergen-C my mom sent me, awful to taste but definitely cheerful-making once you get past that.

we've been slogging away on this thing, getting finals down. all weekend i kept remembering matt talking about zeroing out the mixes on the last record, and ..... well. cooliosis.

east of the sun, west of the moon

i had to say goodbye to a good friend yesterday. i think life is hilarious and that the heart is a funny organ, and that it will break no matter what you do, so you may as well use it up. fully. its the equivalent of trying to bend over in a snow suit after a really big meal. what can you do except bend anyway and love?

youve heard them before but here again are two of my favorite quotes, the first by goethe, the second, martha graham.

"until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. all sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. a whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

and,

"there is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and since there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. the world will not have it. it is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. it is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. you do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. you have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you and keep the channel open. no artist is pleased. there is no satisfaction whatever at any time. there is a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others."

atmosphere

i find my neighborhood all over the tracks we've been editing: the ice cream truck, dogs, kids, the train, traffic, 80s pop at full tilt next door- my god, is it possible to hate 80s pop any more than i already do? gives me a stomach ache and sounds like all the stores i used to walk through listening to that stuff. man. ouch.

run dont walk! a trillion dollars, you could win now!

now the fed will own our bad debt? all the banks? wall street? i mean, out in the open, where it's law. where are the people in the streets? the pitchforks? where are the crowds? can anyone hear???? oh wait, here they are:

LA Times

youtube


and here's how to respond with art:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/07/AR2008100703150.html?hpid=artslot

something wicked this way comes

weather, maybe. rain in fact. first rain since early may. let it bleed!

so we sang 'rachel corrie' and 'you were right' from loy's collection of songs for the haam show. theyre amazing songs, you should check out his record called stories from joe's, worthwhile songwriting for sure. listen to 'why' and 'a rendition', the first about 9/11, the second about the guantanamo disasters. rachel corrie is an actual person, a peace activist, who stood in front of bulldozers down on the gaza strip when the israeli army came in to tear down the settlements; they buried her. the strength of the song is such that i didnt even know about rachel corrie or any of all that when i first heard, just that the song had moved me hugely. dont know where you can find copies of the record except go look up doppler bob on myspace, he played the lapsteel and dobro on it and he'll hook you up. but here's rachel. and also in her own words.

a particular ease

loy bones

(photos courtesy of bob schmidt)


roy michaels died a couple weeks ago and there was a memorial service for him here in town last week, celebrating his life and his music. he played with catmother and the all night newsboys band back in the sixties (you can read his full bio on his website at myspace.com/loybonestheband) and played with all kinds of folks like guitarist amos garrett, maria muldaur, stephen stills, richie furay, and great speckled bird. you can check out the catmother band publicity photo over here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nwilsonphoto/226916697/. the band shared the same manager as jimi hendrix whom they toured the u.s. and europe with. they released four lp's on polydor, jimi produced the first called 'the street giveth ... and the street taketh away'.


he played the haam benefit at heb and down on guadeloupe the last couple years with his sideman, bob schmidt, "doppler bob", on slide and dobro, who will be playing with us on tuesday at a haam benefit show down on w. slaughter and singing a couple songs of roy's, in his honor, and to thank haam for helping him in his struggle with cancer in the last year. join us for lunch down there, have a sub sandwich (have you had one? i havent, will have to finally try one next week!)

winter soldier, pt 2

so mercury is retrograde again, my site went down temporarily and communication is... underground. it seems to swim backwards in the sky at times of retrograde, much like movement forward, as though standing still. but its not, and the movement is just deeper and harder to detect. that's what my friend judith used to say.

the pre release song will be up shortly, fyi. you can check out the austinmusicdownload.com site or minstrelsdaughter.blogspot.com in the coming week for it.



http://www.youtube.com/v/C0YFaLN_LFs&hl=en&fs=1

http://www.youtube.com/v/8DeszyFWL_g&hl=en&fs=1

if people dont vote in a trick election, or enlist to do rich men's dirty work, or allow their children to be recruited by the us army to do it, well, you do the math. maybe we'd pay artists instead? and there'd be a whole lot less karma cleanup for all of us. i am no less guilty than these.

have you read rilke's book of hours, love poems to god? there's one:

my voice grew in two directions
and became a scenting and a cry;
one will prepare the distances,
and the other must be face and blessedness
and angel of my loneliness.

may both voices accompany me
when I am scattered again in city and fear.
they will serve me in the fury of our time
and help me to make a place for you
wherever you need to be.

winter soldier

http://www.youtube.com/v/-iTdxBECos8&hl=en&fs=1

http://www.youtube.com/v/Y6iLoXIpJFQ&hl=en&fs=1

http://www.youtube.com/v/y_cjkWevHNM&hl=en&fs=1

http://www.youtube.com/v/Ymd2KiP-PqY&hl=en&fs=1

http://www.youtube.com/v/Clq4Z3Qc2jo&hl=en&fs=1

so you thought war was a patriot's act? who could blame you? unless of course, you go on thinking it. well just to cheer you up, here's some democracy from leonard:

democracy music video on youtube

and mick put it this way, in sweet neo con:

you call yourself a christian
i think that you're a hypocrite
you say you are a patriot
i think that you're a crock of shit

and listen, I love gasoline
i drink it every day
but it's getting very pricey
and who is going to pay

how come you're so wrong
my sweet neo con.... Yeah

it's liberty for all
cause democracy's our style
unless you are against us
then it's prison without trial

but one thing that is certain
life is good at haliburton
if you're really so astute
you should invest at brown & root.... Yeah

how come you're so wrong
my sweet neo con
if you turn out right
i'll eat my hat tonight

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah....

it's getting very scary
yes, I'm frightened out of my wits
there's bombers in my bedroom
yeah and it's giving me the shits

we must have loads more bases
to protect us from our foes
who needs these foolish friendships
we're going it alone

how come you're so wrong
my sweet neo con
where's the money gone
in the pentagon

yeah ha ha ha
yeah, well, well

mckinney, baldwin, nader and paul

ok, so maybe youre not so into ms mckinney, have you heard of baldwin? me neither. heres biden riffing about the other candidate for president:

http://www.youtube.com/v/955Y3NJTRIE&hl=en&fs=1

alls im sayin is, theres one more month or so before the voting. how do you counteract so much mind control and dollarsense? thats, sense made by dollars, paid for by the Campaign to Elect Who We Can Buy.

voice mail

kennedy/nixon debate

i was working on a track for the record today and didnt hear the phone ring, but i got a message later from a college student who was supposed to be at a friday night party but didnt get there because there was a crowd on campus watching the "presidential debate" in the common room, and they stopped to listen. i had heard yesterday on my way home from teaching a class listening to kut radio that the "president" had arranged a conversation with obama and mccain, regarding the "financial situation". ?? really? why those two? why not other candidates as well? have the elections already happened and i hadnt heard? i suppose the ratings are already in and its a shoe-in? why hold the elections? and the two fellows "put aside" their bipartisanships and got on with talking about the "financial". anyway, here in the caller's words (excluding some color which some folks wont read as feeling or emphasis or emotion, which is what it is) is what was left on my message machine:

"just watching the presidential debates....man! it's all a game, its so depressing. dear god! you know, they're like debating back and forth, back and forth, and obama's saying,'yeah, man, we've gotta get in there, we gotta kill the taliban, we should never have taken our eyes off of afghanistan to go into iraq, blah blah blah, we gotta kill osama bin laden, we gotta find that ...., we gotta take him down!' while, um, while other [dude] mccain is saying 'no, man, we have to get to iraq, we have to kill THOSE ....., i mean come on, let's prioritize here!' anyway, it's all a game, what are they talking about ALLIES, allies for our country? what does our country STAND for anyway? who cares who our allies are? and can i ask you something? um, no matter which president we get, will it change anything in our own lives? do WE actually matter? do ANY of us in this country, actually matter. or is it just the silly little game that we play in middle school and high school, except on a bigger scale with a huge budget, dealing with international affairs with countries they know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about. but they think they have the right to mess around in their political games? it's so, it's just ... insane, i've - i don't understand. i don't understand, how'm i supposed to vote? how'm i supposed to vote for obama? i don't understand how i'm gonna do it. im so sad, i haven't even been able to register to vote, i don't know what to do. anyway, i had to leave, i could only take, i guess i was there, from .. for (looking at watch).. oh my god! i guess i was there for an hour and twenty minutes, i don't know how that happened. but it was painful. it just got to a place where i was like, allies? ALLIES? allies for our country? allies for our country which is about, WHAT? killing osama? (sad laugh) obama, osama, whatever, ok. anyway, love you, call me back, bye."

i couldnt have said it that well so im quoting again. i think its the heart of the matter, when a college student is thunderstruck by the horror show of the political circus prior to voting for the first time and particularly wondering if anyone gets heard. its a big deal. this isnt someone who was raised to have a particular view or other, just their own.

on the other hand, i was hugely influenced by the political climate in my own household, and the country at large, but at that time, when it most impressed me, i saw real passion, and engagement, because the ones i was watching knew they could make a difference and that their voices were being heard in an unprecedented way. not so now. i remembered being at the caucus back in march for the primaries and how several people voting differently from their counterparts (read race, demographic, etc) actually looked scared.

my view of watching the news is that it is a narcotic i dont happen to cotton to. its an inoculation against freedom to listen to the drooling drivel of that great tv show called THE NEWS. who's damn news? not mine. i dont actually believe i have to choose between two idiots arguing over what's the better political choice of targets. i dont actually think i need to vote for warmongers, no matter if theyre dressed up to appear like The Great New Hope or The Hip Conservative with a Spitfire Gal Running Mate. boring. sounds like another episode of law & order to me, with even better ratings. i wish this whole country would wake up and no one would attend the polls and see who gets voted in then, even if theyve already engraved the name on the new presidential door plaque, in bronze, to match the doorknob.

check out the little web site: http://www.bloggingthedebates.com, interesting discussions over there. just so's you know, there are alternatives to curly and moe dancing around like bloodthirsty bears on the abc/nbc/cbs affiliates.

we agree

it's my late grandfather tom's birthday, exactly a hundred years ago today. so, of course, some oliver wendell holmes:


"Little of all we value here
Wakes on the morn of it's hundredth year
Without both feeling and looking queer.
In fact, there's nothing that keeps it's youth,
So far as i know, but a tree and truth."

but i'm quoting again, yes. the title refers to a posting on the daily paul page today.

the anti-mccain campaign, or how i stopped smoking and drinking and shooting at things and learned to love the world think tank

here, in it's entirety, is eve ensler's quote, for those who didnt click-thru yestididy, it's worth reprinting. three mules for sister sarah! (great movie, btw) and i quote


Drill, Drill, Drill

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill." I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Vday site

d'ya like the taste of my broadsword, mountain-ninja?

so, it's colder. by 25 degrees. that's colder by far. i put on my boots for the first time since may. i think its harder to think in a hot climate, for me anyway. cant remember the last time i did some thinking. which doesnt mean there isnt worrying, but worrying's not thinking, or planning, but planning's not thinking either. no, havent done much thinking since i lived in upstate. it justnt hasnt been possible. on the other hand, there's a whole mess of doing, and also being, located in very different centers of the self than thoughts.

i only mention it because i think i miss thinking. its not possible to be crisp in this heat.

september's flower is the aster, have you seen those?

ps a friend, a young guy who included the note "im sending this to every woman i know", sent me an email with a quote by eve ensler about sarah palin worth checking out, its over on arianna huffington's page here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-ensler/drill-drill-drill_b_124829.html

the news that's fit to print... particularly good for anyone who's been inoculated by the endless prattle of the media blitz over the upcoming election, and who thinks that it has nothing to do with ratings and sweeps and keeping everyone glued, very good for you. and who hasnt?

iPod scrabble...

(from www.apple.com, of course)


is a big fat CHEAT and a LIAR!!!!!!! no sh*t! that thing is a total cheat! i swear to you, it 'developed' the words LORIS, RAX, etc. absoLUTE cheatage, no kidding. can't imagine what makes those folks think they can get away w that kinda stuff, man! unbelievable, and i aint got no memory for much, least of all spelling, but LORIS???????????????


dude. time to name that thing hal.

taconic parkway, fall

photos by juliet tondowski and devan mulvaney. landscape by some genius. new york by, well, new yorkers.

aint it great.

full moon

(photo absolutely ripped off by austin blogger mystic friendsy, check out the page.)



louis armstrong once said, "we all play 'do re mi', but you got to find the other notes yourself."

so im working on a couple covers for the record, one of them his and the other, a new piece by stephen mccarthy. mike doughty stole the other cover id been thinking of doing, and he prob did it better so its worth hearing. that was the book of love by peter gabriel; stephen's is just called love.

works for me ;)


ps have you listened to "break it down baby" by robinella????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! god! very nice, and also "press on", sweet.

ike and lincoln, and liberty, too

(pic here of louvre dido © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons)

one thing can be said for hurricanes, they are very impressive when viewed as satellite orange over the ocean blue or traveling some fine inlet like the gulf of mexico, just slouching towards bethlehem and all like a crude beast. before we were viewing weather like that, the prediction would come in the form of news at sea or impending skies or whatever, or animal behavior. I remember noticing, sitting in the kitchen of a girlfriend's house in sunset junction in LA, watching the morning anchors on the weather channel find new words to describe the upteenth storm that season while my sister on the phone was telling me they were driving out of the state. florida was really hit that year, everyone there remembers it, but most people don't remember what year it was.

i remember because it was the same year i split up with my husband, and the summer had been filled with hunting for a new place while staying at my friend's house.

but this year, there are again storms and in between, life. recently someone i know had to go for some basic tests that they were denied because they didnt have medical insurance and the emergency rooms in their state are not required to provide care and absorb the cost; it happened more subtly earlier this summer to another person i know, subtly because here in texas hospitals are required to provide 'indigent care'. that's pig latin for, 'you gotta give a shit'. in the classical version of the hippocratic oath, physicians would say this:

"i swear by apollo physician and asclepius and hygieia and panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that i will fulfill according to my ability and judgement this oath and this covenant: [and here some commitments to be decent and respectful to the one who taught the art of medicine, followed by this very significant phrase:] i will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick [that's diet and nutritional measures, you know] according to my ability and judgement and keep them from harm and injustice."

hippocrates was a doctor in athens during the time of the peloponnesian war. its more or less the same in the modern version, the oath, only without apollo and all. hygieia? goddess of health. panaceia, goddess of healing and daughter of asclepius, god of medicine. you know apollo surely. but the physicians are not really more than pawns in a major schematic to completely dehumanize and unsoul and systematize private human affairs in this ridiculous way to where people aren't even sensible anymore and defer consistently to things like this:

"well, my computer screen is saying...." or "you're not in the system" and "that's just not our policy, miss". to whatever degree there is a malevolent, money-grabbing mind behind these changes in the practice of--well everything, medicine, voting, driving, smoking in a restaurant, on an airplane, keeping your shoe laces tied from when you leave home until you finish travels, etc-- really it's a condition of the times to get dumbed down by meanness and stupidity but dont do it! ;) hospitals are the new healthcare program in america and all the private practice doctors are... out of private practice. i know two doctors who had to leave medicine and go into the insurance business, just to support their families! ??? as for diet and nutrition, that is the medicine.


this summer i wrote a song that i called the dido song. i had been reading (or trying to read) the aeneid and got stopped by the impression after book 1 that the entirety of the modern civilization was what rose up out of the trojan war and the start of what was to become rome and all things of and out of rome began on the journey between troy and tunisia and that new city. the story of dido queen of carthage and aeneas is a terrible story and i think is an amazing and precise depiction of what we have done with the divine aspect of the feminine in our brave new rome--er world, and it appalled me so much i had to write a song about it. i read it like the original sin or crime of our current paradigm, knowhatimean? ts eliot called their meeting in the underworld where aeneas tries to explain himself "the most telling snub" in western literature. its a damn bad premise for a brave new anything nevermind world.

ok ok, shep's gonna.... shep! (uh oh)

mmhhhhnnh.

wow, shep!

yeah.

i know i know you dont have to say it: lay off. i know. how r ya, shep?



;)