Crafted these upon request of a good friend. Will soon be available for order via my site on Etsy.com.
What a fantastic term!
There’s definitely an escapist quality in creating these dreamscape boards that gives us a comfortingly pure and beautiful place we’d rather be than our real lives.
Yes, my life may look like this, but in my fantasy world where I have control and in which money is abundant — my life would look like that.
In other words. don’t judge me by what it looks like I am in this real world our physical bodies occupy — but look at what I identify with… these things beyond my grasp that are more true to how I see myself. Tell me how much you admire what I want to be. What I wish I was.
-ag
There’s a German word for it, of course: Sehnsucht, which translates as “addictive yearning.” This is, I think, what these sites evoke: the feeling of being addicted to longing for something; specifically being addicted to the feeling that something is missing or incomplete. The point is not the thing that is being longed for, but the feeling of longing for the thing. And that feeling is necessarily ambivalent, combining both positive and negative emotions.
via Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble With ‘Curation’ – NYTimes.com.
As Scranton made national headlines this week for the inadequate size of the city bank account and therefore the Mayor’s decision to cut the pay of all city workers to minimum wage, city residents picked on our beloved home as much as emigrants eager to pat themselves on the back for having gotten out of the old coal hole. The worst offenders, however, seemed to be the random grabbers-on who have some sixth degree of seperatation to the “Electric City,” and therefore consider themselves experts on how much it sucks to live here.
I had the opportunity to chat about these bewildering responses to our local fiscal crisis yesterday afternoon with E.W. Conundrum host of Free Speak & Some on WFTE FM Community Radio. You can tune in online via www.wfte.org. The episode airs Sunday, July 15 at 11:30 a.m.
The overwhelming eagerness out there to bash Scranton leaves me wondering- where are our cheerleaders? All poverty aside, there’s a still lot to be said about this honest, straightforward place at the top of the Pocono Mountains where I have chosen to live and raise my kids.
OK, so our politicans are behaving badly and we all now have to suffer for it and that’s not fair. But struggle builds character and no victory is so sweet as the one you have to work your ass off to earn. We’ll get through this. Let’s talk about what will we do then.
Has the entitlement culture so soured us that we can no longer appreciate the simple pleasures of living here? Or are the people who love life just too busy living it to stop and tell these bullies to cut it out?
Even when business was booming in Scranton, most of the wealth was held by a few powerful tycoons. The parks may have been prettier but people survived on thrift and because they invested in communities and supported each other. They weren’t holed up at home watching cable TV on big digital screens, eating over-priced processed junk food and complaining about how somebody else better do something because a tax increase means they can’t go back to Florida next year for the fifth time next winter.
Back in the early 20th century when Scranton was thriving – vaudeville was huge. The city was considered a try out town where audiences could be tested and shows tweaked before transfering to NYC, etc.
“If you can play Scranton,” they said, “You can play anywhere.”
I think that’s more true than ever and I take pride in knowing that if I can keep making art happen in this impoverished place without the support structure and bountiful nourishment supposedly available elswhere, then I can make art anywhere. This dream will not be lost.
Yeah, sure, the city could use a break. It could also use some compassion from the people who live here. Stop kicking Scranton while she’s down and let her know you have faith in her ability to heal, to start over, to find herself again. Take a risk. Give a little love.
It just so happens that next weekend we’ll be seeing a production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (1944) continuing in Duryea (Luzerne County, Pa.) while at the same time (on Saturday, July 21), 64 miles away, Kicking Mule Theatre Company will present its NYC Fringe bound production of Jean Genet’s The Maids (1947) at NACL Theatre in Highland Lake, NY.
That’s all I need to justify my theater column in next week’s ec/dc.
Sarte was a huge champion of Genet and in the early ’50s would base first a character (Goetz in The Devil and the Good Lord) on Genet and then write an entire book about him- Saint Genet. (Which I just ordered even though I can’t afford such luxuries. It’s probably the nicest thing I’ve done for myself in months so… blah.)
Researching lead me quickly to the page of an experimental theater company from Seattle named Saint Genet, most likely with respect to these French artists.
I’m entranced with its “mission statement,” not entirely because I’ve been asked to write at 13 point “No Manifesto” for John Bromberg’s annual Mudball Festival (this year reimagined as the “NoBall Festival” in August. Naturally, I’m jealous we can’t go see a production of this conmpany’s work in NEPA- another sort of nothingness altogether, but I’ll take the inspiration.
It – the Saint Genet mission, not my yet-to-be-written manifesto- follows here:
Being nothing Saint Genet posses nothing, while secretly pursuing the the emanate possession of everything.Saint Genet is the truth of the blood- marriage between our patriarchal, existential mind, and our maternal, essential ever breaking heart. Both Satan and pestilence. Preferring nothingness to being, tension to enjoyment, substance and will, soul and consciousness, magic and freedom, concept and judgment collide, gnash, beat upon, and scream out again and again our cursed black history. We steal everywhere, against everyone, no one is spared.
Our work is directed with a war like fury and aimed, one may say, against an audience. With a mechanical violence our audience has died, over and over again they have died, and still we keep hacking away at the bloated waxy corpse. In the end, exhaustion and suffering lay our murdering hands beside our victim; the murder is a suicide. Quietly me, you, all of us our hearts pounding, know that no one has the right to forgive, no one has the right to forgive, and tomorrow dawn will break, no one has the right to forgive, tomorrow dawn will break, and nothing is beautiful save that which is not.
We must believe that. Must we not?
-ag
You can get a pretty nice look at The Cathedral of Junk in this promo video from Austin’s 7 Towers Theatre Company for an upcoming production of ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore. WOW. See their IndieGogo campain page for more information.
‘TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE – Promo Spot from Matt Latham on Vimeo.
Gregarious Expressions 