tumbel

a week ago i moved to brattleboro for their 9-month pro-track circus training program. i can now say calmly that it took me about a week to feel settled in. maybe six days. but oh lord those first few days were overwhelming. i thought i’d never be unpacked. so i took photos in 30m intervals of unpacking work. it actually didn’t take nearly as many intervals as i’d anticipated, but it did result in this li’l slide show video.

brattleboro has had a rough few months, as everybody i meet informs me. there was a shooting at the food coop. a fire downtown. a truck ran into the movie theater’s marquee. and then irene: the river flooded and barreled right through downtown, sweeping away store contents and breaking windows. bridges and roads were washed out. i moved up here the day after the hurricane, and i feel uncomfortably lucky that none of these things are affecting me at all. part of me wanted to help at a cleanup/work party, but mostly i needed to get my own life here in order.

so far i’ve been to the gym three times: physical therapy knee exercises, rehab/prehab exercises for my elbows and shoulders, stretching, and reminding my body how to do the skills we’ll be assessed on tomorrow, which include (if they’re the same as last year’s) a hollow-body hold, a handstand hold, push-ups, pull-ups, and hanging leg-lift holds. i barely trained at all in august aside from partner acro, so i am hoping those couple days got my body an inch or so closer to where it used to be. i’m sure i’ll be sore all this coming week anyway.

i also went running twice, again something i neglected most of the summer. it’s luxurious to set out for a run with no destination, pace, or time in mind. i’ve been going slow and learned what the town is like. it’s green. it smells like mown lawns all the time. there are peach trees and apple trees dropping fruit on the shoulder of the road. there are a lot of hills.

i’ve ridden my bike a few times, too, after not being able to ride it over the past year and a half because it makes me feel dizzy. eleven vision therapy sessions later and learning how to care for my visual system better, it still makes me feel dizzy, but i’ve been able recover over the course of a few hours. sleeping nine hours a night helps. i’m optimistic and trying not to overdo it, and my sit bones are sore. also, those hills i mentioned. brattleboro is not easy to do on a single-speed bike. i have to walk it up the hill to my house. i’m not sure who’s going to conquer whom yet.

(Source: Flickr / plouay)

4 months ago

the long now

i was listening to a radio program today about this amazing mechanical clock project called “the long now.” it will be built in the nevada desert and will run for 10,000 years, using temperature change as an energy source (the hot sun will cause metal in it to expand in daytime and the cold night will cause it to contract). it will have a different chime for every single day in those 10,000 years. while the clock will be constantly running from this sun energy, it will have to be wound by a person to display time — so when you visit, it will still tell you the time it was the last time a person updated it. it will stay accurate by adjusting itself to when the sun hits noon each day. in addition to logging calendar time (of multiple civilizations’ calendars), it will lso tell astronomical time of things like moon phases, equinoxes, position of planets, plus months, years, centuries, milennia. i am so inspired by this! i want to make art out of it! make a performance piece that follows the same design principles as the clock. or that is about the clock. or about time. so delicious.

also, i love the idea that “the long now” brings up. “now” isn’t fleeting — it’s eternal.

1 year ago

“ I was asking Akram, “How do you deal when you can’t breathe and you think you’re going to die?” He said, “You’ve just got to trust you’re going to be able to carry on and to love the feeling of being out of breath.” So I listened to him, and now I understand what he meant; if you want to go farther with your own self, you’ve got to love the moment of difficulty.

Juliette Binoche 2 years ago

“ Everybody’s always like, ‘On the one hand there’s technique and on the other hand there’s music that you respond to emotionally,’ ” Longstreth notes. “But they’re one and the same in, say, [John] Coltrane’s music. I really like the vibe of transcendence through effort—like, epic striving, in a silly, romantic way. Connecting with a sublime feeling is wrapped up in concentration for me.

David Longstreth (Dirty Projectors), interview in Time Out New York 2 years ago

Design Blog | Janice Arnold Sketches | Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

felt! “with natural locks @ back”! i have always been interested in medium; in the art i make or enjoy i’m attracted to natural materials like silk, cotton, wool, and wood; and i try to use these kinds of things in place of plastic and metal in my life/art wherever possible. but i had no idea how viscerally, sensuously appealing it would feel to be surrounded by felt. especially felt with woolly locks coming out of it.

somehow, i’m going to recreate one of the panels of the palace yurt as a curtain in my room. materials i am considering: silk gauze, silk organza, lightweight fusible web, and/or crocheted something or other. my project will probably not involve any actual wool felt (i’m not equipped to MAKE it), but i hope it will have the same luminous quality.

or perhaps it will be a case in which i find i’ve recreated something to the best of my ability and yet lost the magic of it.

2 years ago

even though i’ve decided to focus on acrobatics and performance as an artist, and even though i haven’t done self-portrait photography in years, i still feel like still photos of myself are the way i know best to convey a particular mood. they feel so much more straightforward and manageable than any other art form. in this case it wasn’t a composed shot but rather a frame i found in a digital video that seemed to say something. leafing through video files feels like cheating but it’s so satisfying.

2 years ago

i made an informal rule for myself that if i bring art-project material into my home, i have to make that project within the week. last weekend erin and i went to twin island, off orchard beach in the bronx, which is more or less paved in sea glass. i collected a small handful to make a mobile to put in my window.

i successfully made the mobile within the week. but it’s not that great. i don’t love it. i could live without it. the idea was nicer than the realization.

that’s a problem with the one-week rule (i made it in less than an hour, not enough time to make it perfect) and also a problem with my sense of myself as someone who can make anything. i tend to think things like, i have never made a sea-glass mobile before but i have materials and a good eye for aesthetics and composition; surely i can pull it off. and then i realize that just attaching all the pieces to each other is so finicky that i have to focus on that and leave the actual placement primarily up to chance.

i made the mobile with the belief that leaving the composition up to chance would create a finished piece with an organic beauty. but now i wish i could redo it with more control over placement. e.g., i’d prefer all the pieces of sea glass to be closer together (there are about 7 pieces). and yet i have no desire to go back and fuss with it any more.

i guess the rule is a mixed success so far.

2 years ago

so, here’s a goal: make studio time each week for my non-acrobatic art forms. sewing or crocheting or zine-ing. all those things i collect materials for but make once a year or less: schedule a regular time in which i can work on a current project. stick to it like i stick to acro training times. it doesn’t have to be a lot but i have to plan it to make it happen.

2 years ago

last night i realized i’m a great big fat minimalist.

i’m not sure why this felt like a revelation. the most inspiring aerial piece i saw recently was performed to a metronome. i’m wearing all white in my favorite self-portraits. i stood in front of sol lewitt’s wall drawings at dia:beacon for ages. when last night’s MC told the audience, “you can clap when you see someting exciting. it’s not a beckett play,” i protested to a friend, “mine’s a beckett play!” (though i felt warm and supported when the audience clapped for me.)

but i realized it last night because while the other aerialists in the show were beautiful, strong, talented, and fantastic, i wasn’t creatively inspired by any of them. too much makeup, too much costuming, too many props, too much melodrama, too much showiness compared to what i’m interested in creating.

of course, minimalism isn’t the only aesthetic that appeals to me. but my attraction to it is a good thing to remember about myself. i’m working my way through twyla tharp’s painfully annoying the creative habit, and i give her props for helping me listen to and understand what inspires and motivates me as an artist.

2 years ago

eden’s music and drawings — my backdrop for tomorrow’s performance.

2 years ago