We’ve been enjoying (not) the apocalyptic orange glow of Canadian forest fires in NYC this week. Question: Is it a good thing that we are experts at smoke, having gone through this ritual in Oregon every year? Performances all over the city continue to be cancelled/postponed (including one of mine). And the other night Ken and I noted that a good number of our phone contacts are now dead, but neither of us can bear to delete them. Question: How can you, or do you, delete your dead? Names, addresses, phone numbers, occupations evoke so many personal memories. For me, each entry is a rich library of the senses – and we all know libraries are under siege.
I’ve been taking an experimental film course (through Dogbotic – highly recommend!), creating art with found film and other early film media, centering everyday manual processes and materials. Experimental art is feral, celebrating much failure and many guesses. It offers many questions but you don’t have to care about the answers (how nice). It pulls in its own language, creating worlds within worlds. It’s what we all did before we had to be good at something.
Our garden that we made in our backyard is furiously improvising within its own (often unpredictable) genetic codes, with squashes, tomatoes and cucumbers racing to climb the walls. This city is prolific in its wildness – with just one bittersweet tree in the corner there are lacewings, leaf-cutters, bumblebees, ladybirds, northern cardinals, mockingbirds, and robins re-creating summer. Their small concentric worlds are a wonder.
