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Tuesday, September 3rd, 2002
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I am exponentially happier since leaving New York. I resist this fact. Because I don't want to be my current landlord, who "did new york for six months after college" and decided it was too hard and scary and now teaches "african influenced" dance lessons throughout midcoast Maine. The warring sides of me: ambitious, competative vs. low key and comfortable. Rockport bridged this gap in my imagination. Intense work days, people who know both worlds-- the working world of film and the alternative reality of this place, intense but rural, lush and beautiful and unable to sustain you full time-- i.e. its not the kind of place you can stay forever-- its good because there is turnover, because people from other worlds come here and provide vital information, the most current knowledge in this or that aspect of photography or filmmaking, and then they go back to where they came from. Right? You get stale if you stay here for too long. But what about Sarah Price? What about people who look around them and make a movie, no matter where they are. I started to make interesting work in Ann Arbor. I just didn't know how to finish it. I came here to learn how to finish work. I came here to gain some technical skills and to not have to worry about money for a while. And it doesn't make a difference if I finish that film and the next one here or in New York or in Ann Arbor. What matters is that I pull it through to the end, and make it good, or the best I can make it, and resist the temptation to sleep. To sleep through it. Any of it. Its tough though when you have beautiful dreams
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Wednesday, August 28th, 2002
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Its getting better. Its only bad at about 3 am now, when I wake up from whatever it was I had on to lull me to sleep; the radio, a movie. Thats when I can hear all the night noises. The things you block out during the day, or even in the evening when you're head is full of the days events. I hate being afraid. And its pretty irrational where I am. I have a guard dog I guess, but still. I'm someone who psychs myself out even in a house full of people. I can scare myself walking to the bathroom. Ad to that the hollow eyed baby dolls from the 30s and 40s that the landlord has downstairs in the living room and you have, well, an easily fabricated nightmare. I think its the smell more than anything. It smells like old house. I try to make it smell like candles and shampoo and coffee but the old house smell overpowers it.
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Tuesday, August 20th, 2002
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My german subletter is not coming. SO I deperately need someone to take my place in Williamsburg. Big, warehouse type space right in the heart of Williamsburg, Brookln, near the Bedford stop on the L. 650 for the month of September. Pass it on.
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Saturday, August 10th, 2002
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tonight's verbs
loved and filled
(eachother, up with summer)
cleaned and painted
(house and walls)
made and poured
(a gallery, the wine)
invited
(them in all)
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Thursday, August 8th, 2002
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As said by a favorite professor of mine
"We want to believe we are nouns, but deep down we are all really verbs."
As said, apparently, by the late John Brockman
"Progress is merely decreation. Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. We must not assume the existence of any entity until we are compelled to do so. This principle is purely destructive, it takes something away.* Decreation: A person can doubt only if he has learned certain things; as he can miscalculate only if he has learned to calculate.* The advances of civilization are gross exaggerations; a function of the language with its built-in commitment to the accretive historical model. Flat earth: round earth. It isn't a one hundred per cent accretive advance from one to two: one hundred assumes and decreates ninety-nine. Round earth assumes and decreates flat earth. Invisible assumes and decreates visible. Events assume and decreate matter. The relativistic universe assumes and decreates the mechanistic universe. Progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious:* decreation. Is it simply that "progress in any aspect is a movement through changes of terminology?* "
1. Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe
(New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1932), pp. 117-18.
Entia non sunt . . . takes something away."
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel,
eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 73e, para. 410.
"A person can . . . learned to calculate."
3. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
(New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1960), p. 14.
"Progress is always . . . what is obvious."
4. Wallace Stevens, "Adagia," is Opus Posthumous
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 157.
"progress in any . . . changes of terminology."
I'm thinking about the things that lead people to feel okay about waging a war.
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Tuesday, August 6th, 2002
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Go ahead. hate me for having such cool ass parents.
Laid back and loving, open minded, open hearted.
Tonight we drank fancy martinis and discussed the folks who might convince us to sway our sexualities. David Byrne was the over all favorite, bringing out the lesbian in us all.
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Saturday, August 3rd, 2002
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Dispatch from Brooklyn (retroactive)
The job in Canada didn’t pan out. I didn’t know where else to go so I headed to New York.
The first night I spent in my apartment there was a crash outside that shook the building. I was that caller to 911 who begged the operator to hurry. One driver dragged the other out of the street, both of them bleeding. Welcome to New York. I made 2 more calls to 911 that week; my dog had eaten glass, my car had been stolen. If I call them again they’ll probably have me forwarded to the hypochondriac hotline. There should be a hotline for people who have just moved to the city. There would be a jewish mother on the other end of the line who would be full of practical answers to impossible problems. "First, go and draw yaself a bath, put some Epsom salts in and get an egg cream from that place on 4th and Bedford…"
Everyone here is deprived of sun. Dark eyes and tight little hearts. The 8-year-old Puerto Rican kid who lives across the street doesn’t want to play with my dog, he just wants to know what he’s trained to do. "He can shake, but can he roll over? Oh yeah, but can he go off leash? Nah, didn’t think so." And walks away. Or how, when I stopped to take photos of the gorgeous sunset over the east river someone came up to me and demanded me to hand over my film. He asked to see ID and threatened to take my camera. When I told him to turn around and look at the sky he told me to shut up and called me a bitch and if I didn’t want my camera busted to keep on walking. A stranger walking by who heard him said"got a flash, girl? You better use it."
I want that feeling of being 16 and taking the train alone out east for the first time, smoking cigarettes with old men in the café car, thrilled that I could be there all night. It happens in little glimpses here, like on the subway home tonight, watching a little kid fall asleep against his dad’s arm or watching the hassidic families walk home from temple on Bedford Ave, or playing BINGO at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, or eating a mango with pepper and lime on the Coney Island boardwalk. (they fish for crabs there at night, boom boxes blaring Spanish music) But I miss the midnight trips to Ypsilanti strip clubs. Or whiskey nights on the beach of lake michigan. Or any of the things we couldn’t do in high school that we did soon after. (Graduation night, gloriously drunk on cheap wine, standing on the Kresge stage stripping off our clothes and singing Dona Nobis Pacem. Maybe you saw us? We hoped that you did.)
This corner of Brooklyn is full of people whose primary concern is looking and acting interesting. They are either rock stars or vegan modern dancer gyrotonics instructor therapists. I live with some of both. The body guru and her friends have steamed Kale parties. I’ll come home to a group of littlle, choppy haired women in their yoga clothes sitting crosslegged on the floor shoveling heaps of it into their mouths and moaning how good it is. She occasionally has a complete meltdown and eats an entire pack of breakfast sausages then sits in front of the television all night wanting to die.
My other roommates are all famous and on tour all the time. Every once in a while I’ll know they are back from London or LA because my bagels will be missing or my shampoo will have mysteriously dwindled. Since I’ve lived here 2 consecutive cats of theirs that have seemed perfectly healthy have suddenly died. And not because I killed them.
"I should have moved to New York City, but I never was that cool. I just languished in the Midwest, like some old romantic fool."
While I’m waffling here in this hell hole my closest and dearest from high school are off to a good start in the real world. Sarah had a baby and is living in a schoolhouse somewhere outside of Ashland, Wisconsin. Her husband is a carpenter and is fixing up the place. Hes tall and handsome and has a Pabst Blue Ribbon tattoo. Mika and Matt are steadily working their way towards being together forever in Bayfield; the poet-waitress and her wild eyed potter. She calls sometimes, sad and drunk, and reminds me that love isn’t the cure for loneliness. I’ll be there in August but its not soon enough. Knowing that the lake is there and that there are probably as many people on it as there are in my apartment makes me nuts. Billie sings "Im living in a daydream, happy as a queen" that’s me, stuck on the daydream.
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To Maine then.
Take the 500 a month farmhouse on Deadman's Curve? Would I haunt myself there? I haunt myself alone at night in my locked car, so I would definitely haunt myself there. The well meaning realtor wouldn't take me into the cellar "cobwebs" she said, with feigned disregard. "I can tell by the smell whether or not theres ghosts" she said, and she meant it. "This doesn't smell like a rotten old house." But to me it did. A beatiful one, one that I could imagine a laid back family of three in because, you see, company scares away ghosts. The kids in the area all have a ghost story about the curve that the farm is built on. I wouldn't ask for the stories, I'd just hear the recognition in their voices when they said "ohhhh, Dead Man's curve..." One of the rooms has eight doors to it. The top floor is caving in a bit, ivy growing through the ceiling and a wasps nest starting there.
Or the hippie family of sweet beautiful girls and their tragically idealistic mother. She believed the dog could love to learn the cat. She bowed to my search. She sent me home with a head of organic lettuce.
Or the nantucket escapee, a sturdy woman in her early thirties, determined to make a home in a new place far away from her bad relationship. The barn will be a studio, the old chicken coupe another apartment. I'll run a summer camp for girls here, we'll make art and pastries-- she used to be a patry chef in San Fran-- She told me the best piece of performance art she ever saw was shown to her by a hooker in the mission, a guy had just hung himself in a garae with a pink light on, and all over the floor was messy porn. More than anything else though, she said, there was something about the color of the light, it was so pink
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J's mom wants to start a quilting retreat at her farmhouse in Nebraska. I'm all for it. I'll make the movie.
A seven year old explained the meaning of the phrase "personal line of symmetry" to me today. Thankyou very much, Ian.
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Detroit. Evan and I, how many years ago? I remember feeling quite old. After a year or two of not seeing eachother we walked to the high brick wall that seperated his parents new neighborhood from the highway and he climbed it, without a fucking branch to hold on to. In the last hour of class today the kids were playing Twister and I was plucking dead stems off of the begonia and I thought about this and had to fight back tears. As I write I remember that he wedged himself inbetween a phone pole and the wall and had me climb him so I could get a peek over the top.
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This city begs you to disappear. I'm almost convinced. I was that woman on the subway crying that you regret not saying anything to. She'll be alright, you thought, I'm sure she has friends. If anyone had reached over to me I would have crumpled in their arms. I would have been grateful.
No wonder people are schizophrenic. Nina, the dog lady, shared with me the way that she talks to (G)od. This isn't a street person, this is my former boss, who I lent my car to last night when I finished riding around on the trains hopelessly.
(So, yes, I always have a way out, and thats more than I can say for some people.)
"If you knew how much I loved you, you would cry tears of joy" (a sticker I've had since I went to Las Vegas that mysteriously ended up inside Nina's van)
Mary has a message for you. Did you hear what she said at Lourdes? Fatima? She said pray. Pray with your heart.
Says Nina, at 11:30 pm, at the wheel of my poor old volvo looking at me with her eyes on fire. A story of betrayal ensues, her lover that left her and took all of her money, 3 years of profits, etc., etc. And it was in Spain, on sept.11th when she went to Fatima and prayed that it all unraveled.
I felt pushed towards sewing all the tiny events of my say into a mystical map. Oh, yes, and THEN I saw the little black dogs-- and then there was the man with the fishing rod on the subway- signs, all of them! But I clenched my fists, pulled my bag from the back of the car and thumped upstairs to my god like dog. n
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MALE SUBJECTS NEEDED for serious documentary on male sexuality. Some pay.
All ages (over 18), sizes and backgrounds. Please e-mail nopervertsplease@hotmail.com.
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coming home every night this week from a 13 hour work day to the sound of a surger (my roommate the costume designer) and bad techno with the bass way up (the stranger with his laptop sleeping on the living room couch)
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I was gonna write every day. Then this happened: www.wbff.org
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things not to do
part I
1. Rent your digital video camera to a stranger who is going to Africa.
2. Close your eyes and open your mouth.
3. Let your dog shit on the street in front of a blind man.
to be continued...
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Thursday, April 25th, 2002
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hey little chicken. hey little chickie woo woo.
are you my
chicken?
are you my little chickie poo?
me talking to my dog.
but it could be lyrics for a cibbo matto song could it not?
whats her face and sean lennon came to to Ann Arbor once and I saw them walking down the street looking kind o f dazed with shopping bags in their hands. You know, it occurs to me, after too long in new york city all you'd know how to do in other places would be shop. Even if there was nothing worthwhile to buy.
who's my little chicken?
who's my little chickookoo?
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maia's journal
